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II. THE PLANTING OF THE APPLE-TREE.

1. Come, let us plant the apple-tree!
Cleave the tough greensward with the spade;
Wide let its hollow bed be made;

There gently lay the roots, and there
Sift the dark mould with kindly care,

And press it o'er them tenderly,
As round the sleeping infant's feet
We softly fold the cradle-sheet;

So plant we the apple-tree.

2. What plant we in this apple-tree? Buds, which the breath of summer days

Shall lengthen into leafy sprays;

Boughs, where the thrush with crimson breast

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Shall haunt and sing and hide her nest.

We plant upon the sunny lea

A shadow for the noontide hour,
A shelter from the summer shower,
When we plant the apple-tree.

3. What plant we in this apple-tree?
Sweets for a hundred flowery springs
To load the May-wind's restless wings,
When from the orchard-row he pours
Its fragrance through our open doors.

A world of blossoms for the bee, Flowers for the sick girl's silent room, For the glad infant sprigs of bloom

We plant with the apple-tree.

4. What plant we in this apple-tree?
Fruits that shall swell in sunny June,
And redden in the August noon,
And drop when gentle airs come by
That fan the blue September sky,

While children, wild with noisy glee,
Shall scent their fragrance as they pass
And search for them the tufted grass
At the foot of the apple-tree.

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5. And when above this apple-tree
The winter stars are quivering bright,
And winds go howling through the night,
Girls whose young eyes o'erflow with mirth
Shall peel its fruit by cottage-hearth;

And guests in prouder homes shall see,
Heaped with the orange and the grape,
As fair as they in tint and shape,

The fruit of the apple-tree.

6. The fruitage of this apple-tree Winds and our flag of stripe and star Shall bear to coasts that lie afar, Where men shall wonder at the view And ask in what fair groves they grew;

And they who roam beyond the sea Shall think of childhood's careless day And long hours passed in summer play In the shade of the apple-tree.

7. But time shall waste this apple-tree.
Oh! when its aged branches throw
Their shadows on the world below,
Shall fraud and force and iron will
Oppress the weak and helpless still?

What shall the task of mercy be
Amid the toils, the strifes, the tears
Of those who live when length of years
Is wasting this apple-tree?

8. "Who planted this old apple-tree?"
The children of that distant day
Thus to some aged man shall say;
And, gazing on its mossy stem,

The gray-haired man shall answer them:
"A poet of the land was he,

Born in the rude but good old times;
"Tis said he made some quaint old rhymes
On planting the apple-tree."

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CHARACTERIZATION BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.1

1. Carlyle is an author who has now been so long before the world that we may feel towards him something of the unprejudice of posterity. It has long been evident that he had no more

1 From Among My Books, by James Russell Lowell.

ideas to bestow upon us, and that no new turn of his kaleidoscope would give us anything but some variation of arrangement in the brilliant colors of his style. The leading characteristics of an author who is in any sense original-that is to say, who does not merely reproduce, but modifies the influence of tradition, culture, and contemporary thought upon himself by some admixture of his own-may commonly be traced more or less clearly to his earliest works.

2. Everything that Carlyle wrote during this first period thrills with the purest appreciation of whatever is brave and beautiful in human nature, with the most vehement scorn of cowardly compromise with things base; and yet, immitigable as his demand for the highest in us seems to be, there is always something reassuring in the humorous sympathy with mortal frailty which softens condemnation and consoles for shortcoming.

3. By degrees the humorous element in his nature gains ground, till it overmasters all the rest. Becoming always more boisterous and obtrusive, it ends at last, as such humor must, in cynicism. In Sartor Resartus it is still kindly, still infused with sentiment, and the book, with its mixture of indignation and farce, strikes one as might the prophecies of Jeremiah if the marginal comments of the Rev. Mr. Sterne in his wildest mood had by some accident been incorporated with the

text.

4. In proportion as his humor gradually overbalanced the other qualities of his mind, Carlyle's taste for the eccentric, amorphous, and violent in men became excessive, disturbing more and more his perception of the more commonplace attributes which give consistency to portraiture. His French Revolution is a series of lurid pictures, unmatched for vehement power, in which the figures of such sons of earth as Mirabeau and Danton loom gigantic and terrible as in the glare of an eruption, their shadows swaying far and wide grotesquely awful. But all is painted by eruption-flashes in violent light and shade. There are no half-tints, no gradations; and we find it impossible to account for the continuance in power of less Titanic actors in the tragedy like Robespierre on any theory, whether of human nature or of individual character, supplied by Carlyle. Of his success, however, in accomplishing what he aimed at, which was

to haunt the mind with memories of a horrible political nightmare, there can be no doubt.

5. Carlyle's historical compositions are wonderful prose-poems, full of picture, incident, humor, and character, where we grow familiar with his conception of certain leading personages, and even of subordinate ones, if they are necessary to the scene, so that they come out living upon the stage from the dreary limbo of names; but this is no more history than the historical plays of Shakespeare. There is nothing in imaginative literature superior in its own way to the episode of Voltaire in the History of Frederick the Great. It is delicious in humor, masterly in minute characterization. We feel as if the principal victim (for we cannot help feeling all the while that he is so) of this mischievous genius had been put upon the theatre before us by some perfect mimic like Foote, who had studied his habitual gait, gestures, tones, turn of thought, costume, trick of feature, and rendered them with the slight dash of caricature needful to make the whole composition tell. It is in such things that Carlyle is beyond all rivalry, and that we must go back to Shakespeare for a comparison. But the mastery of Shakespeare is shown perhaps more strikingly in his treatment of the ordinary than of the exceptional. His is the gracious equality of Nature herself. Carlyle's gift is rather in the representation than in the evolution of character; and it is a necessity of his art, therefore, to exaggerate slightly his heroic, and to caricature in like manner his comic, parts. His appreciation is less psychological than physical and external. 6. With the gift of song, Carlyle would have been the greatest of epic poets since Homer. Without it, to modulate and harmonize and bring parts into their proper relation, he is the most amorphous of humorists, the most shining avatar of whim the world has ever seen. Beginning with a hearty contempt for shams, he has come at length to believe in brute force as the only reality, and has as little sense of justice as Thackeray allowed to women. We say brute force because, though the theory is that this force should be directed by the supreme intellect for the time being, yet all inferior wits are treated rather as obstacles to be contemptuously shoved aside than as ancillary forces to be conciliated through their reason. But, with all deductions, he remains the profoundest critic and the most dramatic imagination of modern times.

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