According To Poets, This Was
Once Philyra, One Of The Oceanides.
The ancients are said to
have used its bark for the roofs of cottages, for baskets, and
for a kind of paper called Philyra.
They also made bucklers of
its wood, "on account of its flexibility, lightness, and
resiliency." It was once much used for carving, and is still in
demand for sounding-boards of piano-fortes and panels of
carriages, and for various uses for which toughness and
flexibility are required. Baskets and cradles are made of the
twigs. Its sap affords sugar, and the honey made from its
flowers is said to be preferred to any other. Its leaves are in
some countries given to cattle, a kind of chocolate has been made
of its fruit, a medicine has been prepared from an infusion of
its flowers, and finally, the charcoal made of its wood is
greatly valued for gunpowder.
The sight of this tree reminded us that we had reached a strange
land to us. As we sailed under this canopy of leaves we saw the
sky through its chinks, and, as it were, the meaning and idea of
the tree stamped in a thousand hieroglyphics on the heavens. The
universe is so aptly fitted to our organization that the eye
wanders and reposes at the same time. On every side there is
something to soothe and refresh this sense. Look up at the
tree-tops and see how finely Nature finishes off her work there.
See how the pines spire without end higher and higher, and make a
graceful fringe to the earth. And who shall count the finer
cobwebs that soar and float away from their utmost tops, and the
myriad insects that dodge between them. Leaves are of more
various forms than the alphabets of all languages put together;
of the oaks alone there are hardly two alike, and each expresses
its own character.
In all her products Nature only develops her simplest germs. One
would say that it was no great stretch of invention to create
birds. The hawk, which now takes his flight over the top of the
wood, was at first, perchance, only a leaf which fluttered in its
aisles. From rustling leaves she came in the course of ages to
the loftier flight and clear carol of the bird.
Salmon Brook comes in from the west under the railroad, a mile
and a half below the village of Nashua. We rowed up far enough
into the meadows which border it to learn its piscatorial history
from a haymaker on its banks. He told us that the silver eel was
formerly abundant here, and pointed to some sunken creels at its
mouth. This man's memory and imagination were fertile in
fishermen's tales of floating isles in bottomless ponds, and of
lakes mysteriously stocked with fishes, and would have kept us
till nightfall to listen, but we could not afford to loiter in
this roadstead, and so stood out to our sea again.
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