One lesson from affiliating a tree--perhaps 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 (the
critic) supposes or says, or whether he likes or dislikes. What
worse--what more general malady pervades each and all of us, our
literature, education, attitude toward each other, (even toward
ourselves,) than a morbid trouble about _seems_, (generally
temporarily seems too,) and no trouble at all, or hardly any, about
the sane, slow-growing, perennial, real parts of character,
books, friendship, marriage--humanity's invisible foundations and
hold-together? (As the all-basis, the nerve, the great-sympathetic,
the plenum within humanity, giving stamp to everything, is necessarily
invisible.)
_Aug. 4, 6 P.M._--Lights and shades and rare effects on tree-foliage
and grass--transparent greens, grays, &c., all in sunset pomp and
dazzle. The clear beams are now thrown in many new places, on the
quilted, seam'd, bronze-drab, lower tree-trunks, shadow'd except at
this hour--now flooding their young and old columnar ruggedness with
strong light, unfolding to my sense new amazing features of
silent, shaggy charm, the solid bark, the expression of harmless
impassiveness, with many a bulge and gnarl unreck'd before. In the
revealings of such light, such exceptional hour, such mood, one does
not wonder at the old story fables, (indeed, why fables?) of people
falling into love-sickness with trees, seiz'd extatic with the mystic
realism of the resistless silent strength in them--_strength_, which
after all is perhaps the last, completest, highest beauty.
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