沃爾特·惠特曼/Walter Whitman
I should not take either the biggest or the most picturesque tree to illustrate it. Here is one of my favorites now before me, a fine yellow poplar, quite straight, perhaps 90 feet high, and four feet thick at the butt. How strong, vital enduring! How dumbly eloquent! What suggestions of imperturbability and being, as against the human trait of mere seeming. Then the qualities, almost emotional, palpably artistic, heroic, of a tree; so innocent and harmless, yet so savage. It is, yet says nothing. How it rebukes by its tough and equable serenity as weathers, this gusty-temper’d little whiffet, man that runs indoors at a mite of rain or snow. Science (or rather half-way science) scoffs at reminiscence of dryad and hamadryad, and of trees speaking. But, if they don't, they do as well as most speaking, writing, poetry, sermons or rather they do a great deal better. I should say indeed that those old dryad reminiscences are quit as true as any, and profounder than most reminiscences we get. (“Cut this out,”as the quack mediciners say, and keep by you.) Go and sit in a grove or woods, with one or more of those voiceless companions, and read the fore-going, and think.
One lesson from affiliating a tree perhaps the greatest moral lesson anyhow from earth, rock, animals, is that same lesson of inherency, of what is, without the least regard to what the looker (or the critic) supposes or says, or whether he likes or dislikes. What worse what more general malady pervades each and all of us, our literature, education, attitude toward each other, (even toward ourselves,) than a morbid trouble about seems, and no trouble at all, or hardly any, about the sane, slow-growing perennial, real parts of character, books, friendship, marriage humanity's invisible foundations and hold together.
我不會選那棵最大或最獨特的樹來描繪。在我麵前，有我最喜歡的一棵樹，那是一棵美麗的黃楊樹，它很直，可能有九十英尺那麽高，最粗的地方直徑達四英尺。它是如此強壯！如此富有生命力！如此地挺立在風雨中！又是如此無言而善諭！它所啟示的泰然自若、生存的本質與人生浮華的表象形成了如此鮮明的對比。可以說，一棵樹也是有情感的，它富有生動的藝術性質，它也是英勇無畏的。它是如此天真，不會傷害任何東西，它又是那麽原始粗野。它無言地存在著，用自己的堅強、平和、寧靜有力地斥責了風雨雷電以及人類——這個一碰到風吹草動就躲進房子裏的沒用的小東西。科學（或者更準確地說是不徹底的科學）對有關樹精、樹仙和會說話的樹等想象嗤之以鼻。然而，即使樹木不會說話，它們卻與大多數的語言、文字、詩歌與訓誡一樣善諭，甚至比它們有過之而無不及。我認為那些關於樹精的古老傳說是非常真實的，甚至比我們大多數人的聯想都更為深刻（“把它砍下來”，騙人的遊醫這麽說，然後留在你身邊）。請到樹叢中或林地間坐下來，與無言的樹木做伴，然後再把前麵的那些話讀一讀、想一想。