TREE A SPIRITUAL SYMBOL
Undoubtedly you know how it feels to behold a cluster of young birches bending gracefully over a sky-mirroring sheet of blue water. Other trees are somberly beautiful like the pines, or inspiringly majestic like the elms, both of which I love dearly. But the sharply pointed cone of the pine suggests the earth on which its broad base rests rather than the sky toward which its top tends a little too urgently. And the elm represents the material side of man in the utmost development attainable, while the spirit still remains in comparative subordination. The birch, on the other hand, is all spirit, it seems to me—but without sacrifice of the indispensable material foundation. Its subtly tapering lines send the eye irresistibly upward and onward to the things that lie ahead and above—things which are neither alien nor hostile to those of the present place and moment, but which, instead, represent the ideal fulfilment of the latter. The birch, therefore, approaches more closely than anything else I can think of toward being a true symbol of life at its best.—Edwin Bjorkman, Collier’s Weekly.
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TREE AND FRUIT
There is no frost hath power to blight
The tree God shields;
The roots are warm beneath soft snows,
And when spring comes it surely knows,
And every bud to blossom grows.
The tree God shields