And yet (one cannot help asking the question): Has any one of us really ever SEEN a Tree? I certainly do not think that I have--except most superficially. That very penetrating observer and naturalist, Henry D. Thoreau, tells us that he would often make an appointment to visit a certain tree, miles away--but what or whom he saw when he got there, he does not say. Walt Whitman, also a keen observer, speaks of a tulip-tree near which he sometimes sat--"the Apollo of the woods--tall and graceful, yet robust and sinewy, inimitable in hang of foliage and throwing-out of limb; as if the beauteous, vital, leafy creature could walk, if it only would"; and mentions that in a dream-trance he actually once saw his "favorite trees step out and promenade up, down and around VERY CURIOUSLY." (1) Once the present writer seemed to have a partial vision of a tree. It was a beech, standing somewhat isolated, and still leafless in quite early Spring. Suddenly I was aware of its skyward-reaching arms and up-turned finger-tips, as if some vivid life (or electricity) was streaming through them far into the spaces of heaven, and of its roots plunged in the earth and drawing the same energies from below. The day was quite still and there was no movement in the branches, but in that moment the tree was no longer a separate or separable organism, but a vast being ramifying far into space, sharing and uniting the life of Earth and Sky, and full of a most amazing activity. (1) Specimen Days, 1882-3 Edition, p. iii. The reader of this will probably have had some similar experiences. Perhaps he will have seen a full-foliaged Lombardy poplar swaying in half a gale in June--the wind and the sun streaming over every little twig and leaf, the tree throwing out its branches in a kind of ecstasy and bathing them in the passionately boisterous caresses of its two visitants; or he will have heard the deep glad murmur of some huge sycamore with ripening seed clusters when after weeks of drought the steady warm rain brings relief to its thirst; and he will have known that these creatures are but likenesses of himself, intimately and deeply-related to him in their love and hunger longing, and, like himself too, unfathomed and unfathomable.