The Lesson of a Tree
I should not take either the biggest or the most picturesque tree to illustrate it. Here is one of my favorites now before me, a fine yellow poplar, quite straight, perhaps 90 feet high, and four thick at the butt. How strong, vital, enduring! how dumbly eloquent! What suggestions of imperturbability and being, as against the human trait of mere seeming. Then the qualities, almost emotional, palpably artistic, heroic, of a tree; so innocent and harmless, yet so savage. It is, yet says nothing. How it rebukes by its tough and equable serenity all weathers, this gusty-temperd little whiffet, man, that runs indoors at a mite of rain or snow. Science scoffs at reminiscence of dryad and hamadryad, and of trees speaking. But, if they dont, they do as well as most speaking, writing, poetry, sermonsor rather they do a great deal better. I should say indeed that those old dryad-reminiscences are quite as true as any, and profounder than most reminiscences we get. Go and sit in a grove or woods, with one or more of those voiceless companions, and read the foregoing, and think.
One lesson from affiliating a treeperhaps the greatest moral lesson anyhow from earth, rocks, animals, is that same lesson of inherency, of what is, without the least regard to what the looker on supposes or says, or whether he likes or dislikes. What worsewhat more general malady pervades each and all of us, our literature, education, attitude toward each other, than a morbid trouble about seems, and no trouble at all, or hardly any, about the sane, slow-growing, perennial, real parts of character, books, friendship, marriagehumanitys invisible foundations and hold-together?
by Walter Whitman
