READING.
Proclamation of State Governor or of School Commissioner.
DECLAMATION.
Arbor Day is an anniversary that looks forward with bright hope. The trees which we plant to-day, will grow into groves and forests of the future, and in their silent beauty and voiceless green will honor the hands that so tenderly planted them. Beneath them the youth yet to be may meet in social banquet, and enjoy the fruitage of our labors.
“We are what wind and sun and water make us,
The mountains are our sponsors, and the rills
Fashion and win their nurslings with their smiles.”
This is not a holiday; but a day especially set apart for the purpose of tree-planting, of observing more closely and studying more carefully the trees, flowers and gifts of the forest; also of cultivating a greater reverence and finer sense of the beautiful and sublime.
What object can better inspire us to gain victory over trials than the grand old oak which in bold defiance to its foes while reeling in the wrath of the tempest is sending down to deeper hold its gnarled roots only to be better able to triumph in the next storm? Our poets have used their purest thought, their sweetest music in praise of the forest and the flowers. Arbor Day provides gracious means of a closer acquaintance with “God’s first temples,” and we hope that this day’s effort may result in much good.