We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit
us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem,
few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the
grove in our minds is laid waste,--sold to feed unnecessary fires of
ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to
perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial
season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the
mind, cast by the _wings_ of some thought in its vernal or autumnal
migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of
the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They
no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China
grandeur. Those _gra-a-ate thoughts_, those _gra-a-ate men_ you hear of!

We hug the earth,--how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate
ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my
account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top
of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I
discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before,--
so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about
the foot of the tree for threescore years and ten, and yet I certainly
should never have seen them. But, above all, I discovered around me,--it
was near the end of June,--on the ends of the topmost branches only, a
few minute and delicate red cone-like blossoms, the fertile flower of
the white pine looking heavenward. I carried straightway to the village
the topmost spire, and showed it to stranger jurymen who walked the
streets,--for it was court-week,--and to farmers and lumber-dealers and
wood-choppers and hunters, and not one had ever seen the like before,
but they wondered as at a star dropped down. Tell of ancient architects
finishing their works on the tops of columns as perfectly as on the
lower and more visible parts! Nature has from the first expanded the