Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/126

112 to stand near a new or rare tree; and few are so handsome as this; singularly allied to the black birch in its sweet checkerberry scent and its form, and to the canoe birch in its peeling or fringed and tasseled bark. The top is brush-like as in the black birch. The bark an exquisite delicate gold color, curled off partly from the trunk with vertical clear or smooth spaces, as if a plane had been passed up the tree. The sight of these trees affects me more than California gold. I measured one five and two twelfths feet in circumference at six feet from the ground. We have the silver and the golden birch. This is like a fair, flaxen-haired sister of the dark-complexioned black birch, with golden ringlets. How lustily it takes hold of the swampy soil and braces itself. And here flows a dark cherry-wood or wine-colored brook over the iron-red sands in the sombre swamp, swampy wine. In an undress, this tree. Ah, the time will come when these will be all gone. Among the primitive trees. What sort of dryads haunt these? Blonde nymphs. Near by, the great pasture oaks with horizontal boughs. At Pratt's, the stupendous boughy branching elm, like vast thunderbolts stereotyped upon the sky, heaven-defying, sending back dark, vegetable bolts, as if flowing back in the channel of the lightning.—The white oaks have a few leaves