I contemplate a tree.
I can accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver ground.
I can feel it as movement: the flowing veins around the sturdy, striving core, the suckling of the roots, the breathing of the leaves, the infinite commerce with earth and air - and the growing itself in its darkness.

Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.

My soul would sing of metamorphoses.
But since, o gods, you were the source of these
bodies becoming other bodies, breathe
your breath into my book of changes: may
the song I sing be seamless as its way
weaves from the world's beginning to our day.

Even as the roots, shut in the darksome earth,
Share in the tree top's joyance, and conceive
Of sunshine and wide air and winged things,
By sympathy of nature, so do I

The tree is more than first a seed, then a stem, then a living trunk, and then dead timber. The tree is a slow, enduring force straining to win the sky.

I drifted on through the midst of this passionate music and motion, across many a glen, from ridge to ridge; often halting in the lee of a rock for shelter, or to gaze and listen. Even when the grand anthem had swelled to its highest pitch, I could distinctly hear the varying tones of individual trees [...] and even the infinitely gentle rustle of the withered grasses at my feet. Each was expressing itself in its own way, - singing its own song, and making its own peculiar gestures - manifesting a richness of variety to be found in no other forest I have yet seen.

I feed my heart with sighs, that's all it asks,
I live on tears, I think I'm born to weep;
I don't complain of that, since in my state
weeping is sweeter than you might believe.

Now I am here; what thou wilt do with me
None of my books will show:
I read and sigh and wish I were a tree,
For sure, then I should grow
To fruit or shade: At least some bird would trust
Her household to me, and I should be just.

Even as the roots, shut in the darksome earth, Share in the tree-top’s joyance, and conceive Of sunshine and wide air and winged things, By sympathy of nature, so do I

When Autumn's shadows idly muse
And tinge the trees with many hues
Amidst whose scenes I feign to dwell
And sing of what I love so well

And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees
and changing leaves.

For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.

I dread no more the first white in my hair,
Or even age itself, the easy shoe,
The cane, the wrinkled hands, the special chair:
Time, doing this to me, may alter too
My anguish, into something I can bear

In the summer when the wind stirs the trees, there is that rushing, swelling sound of masses of heavy foliage, a sound that drowns, in its full-blossomed, undulating, ocean-like murmur, the individual sorrows of trees. But across this leafless unfrequented field these two evergreens could lift to each other their sub-human voices and cry their ancient vegetation-cry, clear and strong; that cry which always seems to come from some underworld of Being, where tragedy is mitigated by a strange undying acceptance beyond the comprehension of the troubled hearts of men and women.