To keep us still thy own!
Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright: for the end of that man is peace.—Psalm XXXVII.
LXX.—AGE OF TREES.
Man counts his life by years; the oak by centuries. At one hundred years of age, the tree is but a sapling; at five hundred, it is mature and strong; at six hundred, the gigantic king of the greenwood begins to feel the touch of Time; but the decline is as slow as the growth was, and the sturdy old tree rears its proud head and reckons centuries of old age just as it reckoned centuries of youth.
It has been said that the patriarch of the forest laughs at history. Is it not true? Perhaps when the balmy zephyrs stir the trees, the leaves whisper strange stories to one another. The oaks, and the pines, and their brethren of the wood, have seen so many suns rise and set, so many seasons come and go, and so many generations pass into silence, that we may well wonder what the “story of the trees” would be to us, if they had tongues to tell it, or we ears fine enough to understand.
“The king of white oak trees,” says a letter-writer in the year 1883, “has been chopped down and taken to the saw-mill. It was five hundred and twenty-five years old, and made six twelve-foot logs, the first one being six feet in diameter and weighing seven tons.” What a giant that oak-tree must have been, and what changes in this land of ours it must have witnessed! It looked upon the forest when the red man ruled there alone; it was more than a century old when Columbus landed in the New World; and to that good age it added nearly four centuries before the ax of the woodman laid it low.