If in this country, where the people from the highest to the lowest, profess to be patriots, they can once be persuaded that planting is a patriotic work, or where all are close calculators of profit and loss, it can be demonstrated to their satisfaction, that it is a profitable one - the end is attained. To those who ask why they should plant for posterity, when posterity has done nothing for them, I would urge these two arguments, profit and patriotism. With all due deference to the wisdom of the oracular Dr/Johnson, I deny both his premises and conclusions, when he offers the following consoling paragraph to the Scotch planters: "There is a frightful interval between the seed and the timber. He that calculates the growth of trees, has an unwelcome remembrance of the shortness of life driven hard upon him. He knows that he is doing what will never benefit himself, and when he rejoices to see the stem rise, is disposed to repine that another shall cut it down." A less gloomy moralist, the good and gentle Herbert, in enumerating the advantages of cultivating the earth, alludes to a common idea, and draws the beautiful simile, "that as the smell of a fresh turned sod is good for the health of the body, so may the contemplation of death be for the health of the soul." The first and last portion of Dr. Johnson's assertion is easily controverted by the calculations and experience of English gentlemen, who have estimated that "a single acre planted with the poplar or larch, will, in favorable situations, and in no longer period than twenty years, yield a produce worth ten times the fee simple of the land." The low price of labor and higher value of wood in Great Britain is about equalised in this country by the lower value of land, so that while the individual estimates are different, the aggregate account is similar.

Walter Scott, who was a practical planter, found that in eleven years the necessary cuttings and trimmings from a larch plantation would pay the expenses attendant upon the first setting out, fencing and rent of land; after that the value increases in a compound ratio. The larch tree is not only a fast growing tree, but produces firm and durable wood, and is well adapted to a soil and climate where little else will flourish. By it large tracts of country in the north of Perthshire were converted from waste unprofitable land to fine woods and pasturage for cattle. The Duke of Athol remarked that the white clover sprung up beneath the larch, the annual fall of the leaves manuring the ground, so that the seeds of this plant which lay dormant beneath the sod, required only a little stimulant to bring them up, after the sod had once been disturbed by the setting of the trees. I should like here to speak upon the subject of spontaneous vegetation, an error very commonly maintained; but the limits of this article will not allow such a digression. To return to our larches.

The poet of nature protested against a "vegetable manufactory" of them being carried on his neighborhood, and I can well imagine that they would not harmonize with the rich landscape of Cumberland and Rydal Mount; but on the bleak hills and barren seashore of New-England, where Emerson, in his Report on the Trees of Massachusetts, has recommended them to be planted, the scenery is far different. These hills, as well as the islands on the Massachusetts coast, were formerly covered with wood, but the injudicious and careless felling of the outer trees first, let in the cold winds upon those which had been tenderly sheltered,

"And the shady nook Of hazels and the green and mossy bower, Deformed and sallied, patiently gave up

Some mute inglorious Milton of those days may hare felt like Wordsworth,

"A sense of pain when he beheld The silent trees and the intruding sky."

Our ancestors had a valid excuse for thus destroying the primeval forest. It was to them no longer the good green-wood of merrie England, peopled with fairies, Robin Good-fellow and Puck, but each tree afforded a secure shelter for the savage Indian, who, with tomahawk and scalping knife, darted from behind the huge grey boles, to inflict a sanguinary death upon those who ventured beyond the "clearings;" thus he who destroyed a tree brought his labor to an excellent work. But now the times have changed; "trees are notes issued from the bank of nature," increasing in value as the eastern portion of the country is becoming rapidly denuded of wood, and the railroads, which in every direction are weaving a net-work amid the northern forests, consume annually the growth of hundreds of acres. Another Evelyn is needed to sound throughout the land a parenesis, to awaken the man of fortune and the farmer to the knowledge that there is pleasure as well as profit in raising something else besides cabbages and monster squashes, for trees will live where not even a turnip will grow. A gentleman in this neighborhood has very wisely offered a premium to any one who plants and makes grow a certain number of forest trees within a limited time.

Some such plan as this, generally adopted by Agricultural Societies, would have a good effect, and make our bleak hills and waste places

"One ample theatre of sylvan shade."

This long digression upon planting brings me at last to the subject with which I intended to have commenced - a visit to the Woodlands, near Philadelphia.

This beautiful place was formerly the seat of William Hamilton, a man of taste, and a patron of the Arts and Natural Sciences. He was a lineal descendant of Andrew Hamil-son, a Scotchman, well known in the early settlement of Pennsylvania as William Penn's deputy governor. William Hamilton, after his return from Europe in 1784, built a splendid house in the Italian style, on the banks of the Schuylkill, and laid out the grounds around it, giving to the sylvan spot the characteristic name of the Woodlands. The mansion is large, and the rooms, even now, though deserted and unfurnished, present an appearance of elegance; the base walls were once ornamented with fine paintings, and the niches adorned with statues. The works of art have vanished, but the beautiful features of nature remain unchanged; the view from the stately piazza, over the bright waters and fertile fields, still delights the eye, as it did in days long passed. Seen from that point, the river in its windings presents the appearance of five detached lakes, the intervening portion "The shadowy woodland hide it,