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. _Trees I am familiar with here_. Oaks, (many kinds--one sturdy Willows. old fellow, vital, green, bushy, Catalpas. five feet thick at the butt, I sit Persimmons. under every day,) Mountain-ash. Cedars plenty. Hickories. Tulip trees, (_Liriodendron,_) is of Maples, many kinds. the magnolia family--I have Locusts. seen it in Michigan and southern Birches. Illinois, 140 feet high and Dogwood. 8 feet thick at the butt [A]; does Pine. not transplant well; best rais'd the Elm. from seeds--(the lumbermen Chesnut. call it yellow poplar.) Linden. Sycamores. Aspen. Gum trees, both sweet and sour. Spruce. Beeches. Hornbeam. Black-walnuts. Laurel. Sassafras. Holly. AUTUMN SIDE-BITS