Excerpt from Address by C. L. Allen Before the Lenox Horticultural Society, Lenox, Mass: Mch, 1903Alone in the solitude of the forest, his eye rests upon some noble old patrician that has defied the storms, sighed and sung to the winds for generations of trees and centuries of years. He asks, from whence comest thou, and why - but there comes no answer. He asks, What is a tree? The only answer comes from the spirit of the wood, look around you.An ardent love for trees was a precious inheritance, the most valuable my father, who was a child of nature, left me. That love was never satisfied, as the mind could not compre hend all the eye claimed as its own, and the beautiful belongs to all who appreciate it. Men may own costly palaces, and have all the pleasures life affords, but the beauty of an old apple-tree, on their grounds, is the inheritance of all that are fortunate enough to see and enjoy it.Many a man has costly residences, simply as external evidences of wealth and power. But some poor woman living in one dingy room, on some dirty, narrow street, gets more satisfaction from a geranium growing in a broken pitcher, in a window seat, because it ministers to her love for the beau tiful. The plant will grow for her, when it would perish in the palace of the wealthy, for it is love that makes the plant grow, as it does everything else that is beautiful. Pardonthis digression and we will answer the question, What is a tree? What IS A tree.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.