memory in the park attached to the Ducal palace.  Nor have the inhabitants of the Black Forest failed in worthy commemoration of their poet’s name.  A prominent peak among the mountains which inclose the valley of his favorite “Meadow” has been solemnly christened “Hebel’s Mount”; and a flower of the Forest—­the Anthericum of Linnaeus—­now figures in German botanies as the Hebelia Alemannica.

THE FORESTER.

  Then bless thy secret growth, nor catch
    At noise, but thrive unseen and dumb,
  Keep clean, bear fruit, earn life, and watch
    Till the white-winged reapers come.—­Henry Vaughan

I had never thought of knowing a man so thoroughly of the country as this friend of mine, and so purely a son of Nature.  Perhaps he has the profoundest passion for it of any one living; and had the human sentiment been as tender from the first, and as pervading, we might have had pastorals of which Virgil and Theocritus would have envied him the authorship, had they chanced to be his contemporaries.  As it is, he has come nearer the antique spirit than any of our native poets, and touched the fields and groves and streams of his native town with a classic interest that shall not fade.  Some of his verses are suffused with an elegiac tenderness, as if the woods and fields bewailed the absence of their forester, and murmured their griefs meanwhile to one another,—­responsive like idyls.  Living in close companionship with Nature, his Muse breathes the spirit and voice of poetry; his excellence lying herein:  for when the heart is once divorced from the senses and all sympathy with common things, then poetry has fled, and the love that sings.

The most welcome of companions, this plain countryman.  One shall not meet with thoughts invigorating like his often; coming so scented of mountain and field breezes and rippling springs, so like a luxuriant clod from under forest-leaves, moist and mossy with earth-spirits.  His presence is tonic, like ice-water in dog-days to the parched citizen pent in chambers and under brazen ceilings.  Welcome as the gurgle of brooks, the dripping of pitchers,—­then drink and be cool!  He seems one with things, of Nature’s essence and core, knit of strong timbers, most like a wood and its inhabitants.  There are in him sod and shade, woods and waters manifold, the mould and mist of earth and sky.  Self-poised and sagacious as any denizen of the elements, he has the key to every animal’s brain, every plant, every shrub; and were an Indian to flower forth, and reveal the secrets hidden in his cranium, it would not be more surprising than the speech of our Sylvanus.  He must belong to the Homeric age,—­is older than pastures and gardens, as if he were of the race of heroes, and one with the elements.  He, of all men, seems to be the native New-Englander, as much so as the oak, the granite ledge, our best sample of an indigenous American, untouched by the Old Country, unless he came down from Thor, the Northman; as yet unfathered by any, and a nondescript in the books of natural history.