The oak tree - whatever we may think of the other productions of the poetaster of whom Byron wrote--

"Let hoarse Fitzgerald bawl His creaking couplets in a tavern hall," probably every one will endorse the one line quoted from him in the parody in "Rejected Addresses"--"The tree of freedom is the British Oak."

The massive trunk whose noble proportions suggested to Smeaton the design of his Eddystone Lighthouse, is an emblem of majestic and sublime endurance which can hardly be better described than in the following passage by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes:--

"There is a mother-idea in each particular kind of tree, which, if well marked, is probably embodied in the poetry of every language. Take the Oak, for instance, and we find it always standing as a type of strength and endurance. I wonder if you ever thought of the single mark of supremacy which distinguishes this tree from all our other forest trees? All the rest of them shirk the work of resisting gravity: the Oak alone defies it. It chooses the horizontal direction for its limbs, so that their whole weight may tell, and then stretches them out fifty or sixty feet, so that the strain may be mighty enough to be worth resisting. You will find that, in passing from the extreme downward droop of the branches of the weeping willow to the extreme upward inclination of those of the poplar, they sweep nearly half a circle. At ninety degrees the Oak stops short: to slant upward another degree would mark infirmity of purpose: to bend downwards, weakness of organization."