twigs give it a sunny aspect, which is not without a cheering
influence even in the grayest and gloomiest day. Beneath a clouded
sky it faithfully remembers the sunshine. Our old house would lose
a charm were the willow to be cut down, with its golden crown over
the snow-covered roof and its heap of summer verdure.

The lilac-shrubs under my study-windows are likewise almost in leaf:
in two or three days more I may put forth my hand and pluck the
topmost bough in its freshest green. These lilacs are very aged,
and have lost the luxuriant foliage of their prime. The heart, or
the judgment, or the moral sense, or the taste is dissatisfied with
their present aspect. Old age is not venerable when it embodies
itself in lilacs, rose-bushes, or any other ornamental shrub; it
seems as if such plants, as they grow only for beauty, ought to
flourish always in immortal youth, or, at least, to die before their
sad decrepitude. Trees of beauty are trees of paradise, and
therefore not subject to decay by their original nature, though they
have lost that precious birthright by being transplanted to an
earthly soil. There is a kind of ludicrous unfitness in the idea of
a time-stricken and grandfatherly lilac-bush. The analogy holds
good in human life. Persons who can only be graceful and ornamental
--who can give the world nothing but flowers--should die young, and
never be seen with gray hair and wrinkles, any more than the flower-
shrubs with mossy bark and blighted foliage, like the lilacs under
my window. Not that beauty is worthy of less than immortality; no,
the beautiful should live forever,--and thence, perhaps, the sense
of impropriety when we see it triumphed over by time. Apple-trees,
on the other hand, grow old without reproach. Let them live as long
as they may, and contort themselves into whatever perversity of
shape they please, and deck their withered limbs with a springtime