The Elms

“ My wanderings led me through a country of simple rural charm, and the friends that became dearest to me were just our English elms.
Who but the solitary, artists alone excepted, understand the full charm of elms in an English landscape? To us there is an especial appeal in their loneliness, as they range apart along the hedgerows, embayed in blue air and sunlight which do but play upon the fringe of your huddling forest. ”

“ The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth's surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; ”

“ You travel too quickly to notice many small things; you see nothing save the troops of elms on the verge of invisibility. But walking I saw every small thing one by one; not only the handsome gateway chestnut just fully [200] dressed, and the pale green larch plantation where another chiff-chaff was singing, and the tall elm tipped by a linnet pausing and musing a few notes, but every primrose and celandine and dandelion on the banks, every silvered green leaf of honeysuckle up in the hedge, every patch of brightest moss, every luminous drop on a thorn tip. ”

“ M. has gone off to leave ours at Captain Hall's door, and then he will leave his card at ours, and there the matter will end.
We have been walking over the town, over the ramparts, and through some fine gravelled avenues shaded with elms. Don't fancy our elms, with their drooping embowering branches—no, nothing so beautiful—but what we call the English elm, with its upright, stiff stem. ”

“ The elm is fully clothed down to the drooping tips of the branchlets with foliage, which, though deepest green above, reflects, under its dense shade, a soft light from the paler green of the lower side. It is no wonder that New England claims fame for her elms, which, loved and cared for, arch over the long village streets that give character to the homes of the descendants of the Puritan fathers. The fully grown elm presents to the sun a darkly absorbent hue, and to the passer-by who rests beneath its shade the most grateful and restful color in all the rainbow's palette. ”

“ When I stand where half a dozen large Elms droop over a house, it is as if I stood within a ripe pumpkin-rind, and I feel as mellow as if I were the pulp, though I may be somewhat stringy and seedy withal. What is the late greenness of the English Elm, like a cucumber out of season, which does not know when to have done, compared with the early and golden maturity of the American tree? The street is the scene of a great harvest-home. ”

“ Our naturalists have often referred to this incidentally or expressly; but the animus of Nature in the two half globes of the planet is so momentous a point of interest to our race, that it should be made a subject of express and elaborate study. Go out with me into that walk which we call the Mall, and look at the English and American elms. The American elm is tall, graceful, slender-sprayed, and drooping as if from languor. The English elm is compact, robust, holds its branches up, and carries its leaves for weeks longer than our own native tree. ”

“ When one looks through a long double row of these, as in that lovely avenue which the poets of Yale remember so well,
“Oh, could the vista of my life but now as bright appear As when I first through Temple Street looked down thine espalier!”
he beholds a temple not built with hands, fairer than any minster, with all its clustered stems and flowering capitals, that ever grew in stone.
Nobody knows New England who is not on terms of intimacy with one of its elms. The elm comes nearer to having a soul than any other vegetable creature among us. It loves man as man loves it. ”

“ They embrace every chance to cut them down. They have no idea of their fitness for anything but firewood or fruit bearing. But a great cathedral elm, with shadowy aisles of boughs, its choir of whispering winds and chanting birds, its hush and solemnity and majestic grandeur, actually conquers the dull human race and asserts its leave to be in a manner to which all hearts respond; and so the great elms of New England have got to be regarded with a sort of pride as among her very few crown jewels, and the Pitkin elm was one of these. ”

“ The most interesting comparison I made was between the New England and the Old England elms. It is not necessary to cross the ocean to do this, as we have both varieties growing side by side in our parks,--on Boston Common, for instance. It is wonderful to note how people will lie about big trees. There must be as many as a dozen trees, each of which calls itself the "largest elm in New England." ”

“ I am not sure that I remember any other first-class elms in New England, but there may be many.
- What makes a first-class elm? - Why, size, in the first place, and chiefly. Anything over twenty feet of clear girth, five feet above the ground, and with a spread of branches a hundred feet across, may claim that title, according to my scale. All of them, with the questionable exception of the Springfield tree above referred to, stop, so far as my experience goes, at about twenty-two or twenty-three feet of girth and a hundred and twenty of spread. ”

“ It is a grand elm for size of trunk, spread of limbs, and muscular development,--one of the first, perhaps the first, of the first class of New England elms.
The largest actual girth I have ever found at five feet from the ground is in the great elm lying a stone's throw or two north of the main road (if my points of compass are right) in Springfield. But this has much the appearance of having been formed by the union of two trunks growing side by side.
The West-Springfield elm and one upon Northampton meadows belong also to the first class of trees. ”

“ It is a hard fight they are going to have, and they strip their coats off and roll up their shirt-sleeves, and show themselves bare-armed and ready for the contest. The English elms are of a more robust build, and stand defiant, with all their summer clothing about their sturdy frames. They may yet have to learn a lesson of their American cousins, for notwithstanding their compact and solid structure they go to pieces in the great winds just as ours do. We must drop much of our foliage before winter is upon us. ”

“ Dowling, in a strange, soft voice, as if her thoughts were far away, while nervously, as one blind, she returned the walking-stick to her husband, "I suppose it is the music, or the moonlight, or all the sad memories influencing me; but I see so clearly the doctor clinging to his cane for life, and a savage-looking man, like Elms, but different, looking down on the poor soul. ”

“ As we advance through noble elms and planetrees, crowds of contadini line the way, beggars scream from the banks, donkeys bray, carretti rattle along, until at last we arrive at a long meadow which seems alive and crumbling with gayly dressed figures that are moving to and fro as thick as ants upon an ant-hill. ”

“ The immense, solitary, half-veiled autumn land is hissing with the kisses of rain in elms and hedgerows and grass, and underfoot the tunnelled soil gurgles and croaks. Secret and content, as if enjoying a blessed interval of life, are the small reedy pools where the moorhens hoot and nod in the grey water; beautiful the hundred pewits rising in ordered flight as they bereave the grey field and, wheeling over the leagues that seem all their own, presently make another field all a-flower by their alighting ”

“ Above all the trees of the New World, the Elm deserves to be considered the sovereign tree of New England. It is abundant both in field and forest, and forms the most remarkable feature in our cleared and cultivated grounds. Though the Elm is found in almost all parts of the country, in no other is it so conspicuous as in the Northeastern States, where, from the earliest settlement of the country, it has been planted as a shade-tree, and has been valued as an ornament above the proudest importations from a foreign clime. ”

“ In the twilight, when you can only see the outlines of the trees in the horizon, the elm-tops indicate where the houses are. I have looked afar over fields and even over distant woods and distinguished the conspicuous graceful, sheaf-like head of an elm which shadowed some farmhouse. From the northwest (?) part of Sudbury you can see an elm on the Boston road, on the hilltop in the horizon in Wayland, five or six miles distant. The elm is a tree which can be distinguished farther off perhaps than any other. ”

“ Every year of his life has he seen the beautiful Hang-Bird weave his pensile habitation upon the long and flexible branches of the Elm, secure from the reach of every living creature. From its vast dome of interwoven branches and foliage he has listened to the songs of the earliest and the latest birds; and under its shelter he has witnessed many a merry-making assemblage of children, employed in the sportive games of summer.
To a native of New England, therefore, the Elm has a value more nearly approaching that of sacredness than any other tree. ”

“ The elf of England and Germany, the alfr of the North, was a being dear to the imagination of the people. His name means the white, the same word already mentioned as forming the Latin albus, and designating the Elbe and the Alps, as well as appearing in the Elphin of Cymric legend. The elves, or white spirits, were supposed to be beautiful shadowy gifted beings, often strangely influencing the life of mortals, so that in old Germany the Alfr were the genii of man’s life, like the Disir of the North; and Elberich probably originally attended Otnit in this capacity. ”

“ O, yes, nature, nature abhors a vacuum, and these Alfar are by far the most numerous of all the supernatural beings. The White Elves, or Elves of Light, are seldom found out of Norway and Sweden, but the Brown Elf you have in Scotland as well. He works in metals of all sorts, though he delights most in silver and gold. It is the Brown Elf that is the fitful capricious being, which gives their meaning to the words elf and elvish: these are the creatures which pinch untidy maids, and drink up the milk, and light up their evening candles as Wills’-o’-the-Wisp, and lead men into bogs and marshes. ”

“ Elmo, my patron, that if I were to fight to-morrow in camp with this copper face, you would say: ‘Our Lady for the Bohemian!’”
“Without doubt, I would say it.”
“You would say it?”
“Why, yes. Ought I not to take the part of the weak against the strong,—the small against the great? Ought I not at least to encourage the poor man who would dare challenge the formidable, unconquerable arm of the captain of The Holy Terror to the Moors?”
“Holy Cross! you are jesting, Stephanette, and I have no desire for it now.” ”

“ Another great elm, near London, has a winding staircase cut within it, and a turret at the top where at least twenty persons can stand. One species of this tree, called the wych-, or witch-, elm, was believed by ignorant people to possess magical powers and to defend from the malice of witches the place on which it grew. ”

“ First Elfrain, for his silvern tongue
Renowned his Faery feres among,
Upon a fallen beech-nut sprung,
Spake clear, while hushed they hearkened:
“It little needs, ye Elves” (he said) ,
“To bid you ’ware the direful dread,
By gathering glooms and shadows spread,
Wherewith our days are darkened. ”

“ It is by no means improbable that there may be more in these faint whispers than would at first appear, and that underneath these dim traditions of churches swallowed by the sea there may rest a faint stratum of the old Scandinavian superstition that sweet singing and beautiful music could be heard by any who stood to listen on an Elf hill ”

“ ELSA AND THE TEN ELVES From Sweden
Once upon a time a little girl named Elsa lived on a farm. She was pretty, sweet-tempered, and generous, but she did not like to work. Her father was very proud of her, and sent her to school in the city. She learned to read, write, sing, and dance, but still she did not know how to cook, sew, or care for a house.
When she grew older, she was so good and beautiful that many young men wished her for a wife, but she said “No” to all except to her neighbour, Gunner, a handsome, industrious young farmer. Soon they were married, and went to live on his farm. ”

“ A short distance further west is the lumbering town of Elma, which I take a great pride in, on account of its name, being, as you see, the same as my own. It is a busy little city with important railway connections, in addition to its thriving lumbering trade. ”

“ The Notch seems beyond the world, North Elba and its half-dozen houses are beyond the Notch, and there is a wilder little mountain road which rises beyond North Elba. But the house we seek is not even on that road, but behind it and beyond it; you ride a mile or two, then take down a pair of bars; beyond the bars faith takes you across a half-cleared field, through the most difficult of wood-paths, and after half a mile of forest you come out upon a clearing. ”

“ It was years before she sacrificed the curling moustache to a clean-shaven duke, and shuddered at the suggestion of oil in his hair.
The despair of her life stood in the corner of the white and gold drawing-room. It was an enormous Alexander harmonium. Once, in an easy moment, on conversing affably with her duke in a whisper, she had suggested to him that Miss Grace might let her play on this instrument. Miss Grace, coming in then, was in time to see her lips moving, and considered that the sweet child worked at her lessons. Elma was too sincere to deceive her. ”

“ Herder was probably misled by the fact that the Danish word elle signifies not only elf, but also alder tree (Ger. Erle) . His mistake at any rate has been perpetuated by both English and French translators, who speak of a “king of the alders,” “un roi des aunes,” and find an explanation of the myth in the tree-worship of early times, or in the vapoury emanations that hang like weird phantoms round the alder trees at night. ”