If it were necessary to present any other inducement to the country gentleman to form plantations of trees, than the great beauty and value which they add to his estate, we might find it in the pleasure which all derive from their cultivation. Unlike the pleasure arising from the gratification of our taste in architecture, or any other of the arts whose productions are offered to us perfect and complete, the satisfaction arising from planting and rearing trees is never weakened. "We look," says a writer, "upon our trees as our offspring; and nothing of inanimate nature can be more gratifying than to see them grow and prosper under our care and attention,- nothing more interesting than to examine their progress, and mark their several peculiarities. In their progress from plants to trees, they every year unfold new and characteristic marks of their ultimate beauty, which not only compensate for past cares and troubles, but like the returns of gratitude, raise a most delightful train of sensations in the mind; so innocent and rational, that they may justly rank with the most exquisite of human enjoyments." "Happy is he, who in a country life Shuns more perplexing toil and jarring strife; Who lives upon the natal soil he loves, And sits beneath his old ancestral groves." To this, let us add the complacent feelings with which a man in old age may look around him and behold these leafy monarchs, planted by his boyish hands and nurtured by him in his youthful years, which have grown aged and venerable along with him; "A wood coeval with himself he sees, And loves his own contemporary trees."
