One has the leisure of July for perceiving
all the differences of the green of leaves.
It is no longer a difference in degrees of maturity,
for all the trees have darkened to their final tone,
and stand in their differences of character and not
of mere date. Almost all the green is grave,
not sad and not dull. It has a darkened and a
daily colour, in majestic but not obvious harmony
with dark grey skies, and might look, to inconstant
eyes, as prosaic after spring as eleven o’clock
looks after the dawn.
Gravity is the word — not
solemnity as towards evening, nor menace as at night.
The daylight trees of July are signs of common beauty,
common freshness, and a mystery familiar and abiding
as night and day. In childhood we all have a
more exalted sense of dawn and summer sunrise than
we ever fully retain or quite recover; and also a far
higher sensibility for April and April evenings — a
heartache for them, which in riper years is gradually
and irretrievably consoled.
But, on the other hand, childhood
has so quickly learned to find daily things tedious,
and familiar things importunate, that it has no great
delight in the mere middle of the day, and feels weariness
of the summer that has ceased to change visibly.
The poetry of mere day and of late summer becomes
perceptible to mature eyes that have long ceased to
be sated, have taken leave of weariness, and cannot
now find anything in nature too familiar; eyes which
have, indeed, lost sight of the further awe of midsummer
daybreak, and no longer see so much of the past in
April twilight as they saw when they had no past;
but which look freshly at the dailiness of green summer,
of early afternoon, of every sky of any form that
comes to pass, and of the darkened elms.
Not unbeloved is this serious tree,
the elm, with its leaf sitting close, unthrilled.
Its stature gives it a dark gold head when it looks
alone to a late sun. But if one could go by
all the woods, across all the old forests that are
now meadowlands set with trees, and could walk a county
gathering trees of a single kind in the mind, as one
walks a garden collecting flowers of a single kind
in the hand, would not the harvest be a harvest of
poplars? A veritable passion for poplars is a
most intelligible passion. The eyes do gather
them, far and near, on a whole day’s journey.
Not one is unperceived, even though great timber should
be passed, and hill-sides dense and deep with trees.
The fancy makes a poplar day of it. Immediately
the country looks alive with signals; for the poplars
everywhere reply to the glance. The woods may
be all various, but the poplars are separate.
All their many kinds (and aspens,
their kin, must be counted with them) shake themselves
perpetually free of the motionless forest. It
is easy to gather them. Glances sent into the
far distance pay them a flash of recognition of their
gentle flashes; and as you journey you are suddenly
aware of them close by. Light and the breezes
are as quick as the eyes of a poplar-lover to find
the willing tree that dances to be seen.
No lurking for them, no reluctance.
One could never make for oneself an oak day so well.
The oaks would wait to be found, and many would be
missed from the gathering. But the poplars are
alert enough for a traveller by express; they have
an alarum aloft, and do not sleep. From within
some little grove of other trees a single poplar makes
a slight sign; or a long row of poplars suddenly sweep
the wind. They are salient everywhere, and full
of replies. They are as fresh as streams.
It is difficult to realize a drought
where there are many poplars. And yet their
green is not rich; the coolest have a colour much mingled
with a cloud-grey. It does but need fresh and
simple eyes to recognize their unfaded life.
When the other trees grow dark and keep still, the
poplar and the aspen do not darken — or hardly — and
the deepest summer will not find a day in which they
do not keep awake. No waters are so vigilant,
even where a lake is bare to the wind.
When Keats said of his Dian that she
fastened up her hair “with fingers cool as aspen
leaves,” he knew the coolest thing in the world.
It is a coolness of colour, as well as of a leaf
which the breeze takes on both sides — the
greenish and the greyish. The poplar green has
no glows, no gold; it is an austere colour, as little
rich as the colour of willows, and less silvery than
theirs. The sun can hardly gild it; but he can
shine between. Poplars and aspens let the sun
through with the wind. You may have the sky
sprinkled through them in high midsummer, when all
the woods are close.
Sending your fancy poplar-gathering,
then, you ensnare wild trees, beating with life.
No fisher’s net ever took such glancing fishes,
nor did the net of a constellation’s shape ever
enclose more vibrating Pleiades.