So waved the pine-tree through my thought. Emerson.
 
In outward, every-day affairs, in what we foolishly call real life, man is a for , a believer in the , "Order is heaven's first law." He sets his house at right angles with the street; lays out his grounds in the straightest of straight lines, or in the most undeviating of curves; selects his shade-trees for their trim, geometrical habit; and, all in all, carries himself as if precision and were the height of . Yet this same man, when he comes to deal with representations, makes up his according to quite another standard; finding nothing in tidy gardens and shaven lawns, discarding without every well-rounded, symmetrical tree, delighting in and disproportion, loving a ruin better than the best appointed [183]palace, and a tumble-down wall better than the and stanchest of new-laid . It is hard to know what to think of an inconsistency like this. Why should taste and principle be thus opposed to each other, as if the same man were half , half Bohemian? Can this strong æsthetic preference for imperfection be based upon some permanent, universal law, or is it only a passing , the fashion of an hour?
 
Whatever we may say of such a problem,—and where one knows nothing, it is perhaps wisest to say nothing,—we may surely count it an occasion for thankfulness that a thing so common as imperfection should have at least its favorable side. Music would soon become tame, if not intolerable, without here and there a ; and who knows how stupid life itself might prove without some slight admixture of evil? From my study-windows I can see of the newest and most in town; but I more often look, not at them, but at a certain dilapidated old house, blackening for want of paint, and fast falling into decay, but with one big elm before the door. I have no hankerings to live in it; as a dwelling-place, I should no doubt prefer one of the more modern establishments; but for an object to look at, give me the .
 
Human nature is nothing if not paradoxical. In its eyes everything is both good and bad; and for my own part, I sometimes wonder whether this may not be the sum of all wisdom,—to find everything good in its place, and everything bad out of its place.
 
Thoughts like these suggest themselves as I look at the pitch-pine, which, to speak only of such trees as grow within the range of my own observation, is the one irregular member of the family of cone-bearers. The white or Weymouth pine, the , the , the spruces, the fir, and the , these are all, in different ways, of a decidedly symmetrical turn. Each of them has its own definite plan, and builds itself up in fastidious conformity therewith, except as outward conditions may now and then force an individual into some abnormal . And all of them, it need not be said, have the defect of this quality. They are not without charm, not even the black spruce, while the Weymouth pine and the hemlock are often of surpassing magnificence and beauty; but a to rule must of necessity be attended with a corresponding absence of freedom and variety. The pitch-pine, on the other hand, if it works upon any set scheme, as no doubt it does, has the grace to keep it out of sight. Its gift is genius rather than talent. It has an air, as genius always has, of achieving its results without effort or premeditation. Its method is that of spontaneity; its style, that of the picturesque-homely, so dear to the <............