carried from the leaves to all parts of the plant or tree, to nourish
it and continue its growth. Such is the important and wonderful work
of the leaf, the tender, delicate leaf, which we crumple so easily in
our fingers. It builds up, atom by atom, the tree and the great
forests which beautify the world and provide for us a thousand
comforts and conveniences. Our houses and the furniture in them, our
boats and ships, the cars in which we fly so swiftly, the many
beautiful and useful things which are manufactured from wood of
various kinds, all these, by the help of the sun, are furnished us by
the tiny leaves of the trees.


BRYANT, THE POET OF TREES.

"It is pleasant," as Mr. George W. Curtis has said, "to
remember, on Arbor Day, that Bryant, our oldest American
poet and the father of our American literature, is
especially the poet of trees. He grew up among the solitary
hills of western Massachusetts, where the woods were his
nursery and the trees his earliest comrades. The solemnity
of the forest breathes through all his verse, and he had
always, even in the city, a grave, rustic air, as of a man
who heard the babbling brooks and to whom the trees told
their secrets."

His "Forest Hymn" is familiar to many, but it cannot be too
familiar. It would be well if teachers would encourage their
pupils to commit the whole, or portions of it, at least, to
memory. Let it be made a reading lesson, but, in making it
such, let pains be taken to point out its felicities of