I started to speak of the villa and not of myself, but it was one of those places so inextricably entwined with the web of my own life that I cannot even now set it apart from personal associations and memories. I think it must have been there that I first made friends with trees—as trees. In our enchanted garden on the Esquiline we had cypresses—the most perfect in all Italy—orange trees and ilexes, and one or two flowering junipers, but no shade trees or bits of woodland like those in the Borghese, where the ancient oaks and chestnuts and beeches meet high overhead along avenues so extensive that to make the round twice in an afternoon was as much as most people ever did. As one drove through those avenues one looked down on the unexplored and ever varied fields and woods within the circle, and, whether in winter or summer, at morning or at evening, one could always catch some new and lovely aspect of light and shade; it might be of mossed foliage, all bronze and velvet, thinning off into a copse of saplings unfurling their veil of feathery green in some breath of wind that left the giants calm and unruffled; or it might be a screen of bare tracery rising from some ridge, in cool, neutral tints into the chastened blue of an autumn sky; or again the fervid umber of slender trunks and branches cast up against the pale lemon and chrysoprase of a winter sunset; the blessed trees sounded every note, clothed themselves in every tint that human love and passion know, from the fresh unconscious caress of childhood to the pomegranate outburst of first love—and on to the gathered changeless riches of the heart’s maturity—beyond which there lies nothing but dissolution and re-birth. I cannot explain these things; those who know them as I do admit the mystic relationship of some of us to the trees; they can suffer, as I do, when murderers slay them ruthlessly, can kneel beside the fallen monarch and touch his pitiful wounds, and murmur all our love and veneration to the great heart that never will feel the sap leap and surge again. One poet said it for us all, when he wept in the woods before dawn and cried:
“Great man-bodied tree, That mine arms in the dark are embracing, What magic of sympathy lies Between dear over-beautiful trees and the rain of the eyes?”