Saturday 12th December 1874
There is a beauty in the trees peculiar to winter, when their fair delicate slender tracery unveiled by leaves and showing clearly against the sky rises bending with a lofty arch or sweeps gracefully drooping. The crossing and interlacing of the limbs, the smallest boughs and tender twigs make an exquisitely fine network which has something of the severe beauty of sculpture, while the tree in summer in its full pride and splendour and colour of foliage represents the loveliness of painting. The deciduous trees which seem to me most graceful and elegant in winter are the birches, limes, beeches. Opposite our South terrace windows towers a glorious ash, ivy-muffled to its throat, while its boughs sweeping gracefully fall in drooping showers all about it like a woman's hair softly flowing, or the arched cascade of water falling from the jet of a fountain.
Rev. Francis Kilvert
