Also it may be well for lowland branches to reach hither and thither for what they need, and to take all kinds of irregular shape and extension. But the pine is trained to need nothing and to endure everything. It is resolvedly whole, self-contained, desiring nothing but rightness, content with restricted completion. Tall or short, it will be straight. Small or large, it will be round. It may be permitted also to these soft lowland trees that they should make themselves gay with show of blossom, and glad with pretty charities of fruitfulness. We builders with the sword have harder work to do for man, and must do it in closeset troops. To stay the sliding of the mountain snows, which would bury him; to hold in divided drops at our sword points the rain, which would sweep away him and his treasure fields; to nurse in shade among our brown fallen leaves the tricklings that feed the brooks in drought; to give massive shield against the winter wind, which shrieks through the bare branches of the plain; such service must we do him steadfastly while we live. Our bodies also are at his service: softer than the bodies of other trees, though our toil is harder than theirs. Let him take. them as pleases him, for his houses and ships. So also it may be well for these timid lowland trees to tremble with all their leaves, or turn their paleness to the sky, if but a rush of rain passes by them; or to let fall their leaves at last, sick and sere. But we pines must live carelessly amidst the wrath of clouds. We only wave our branches to and fro when the storm pleads with us, as men toss their arms in a dream.

And finally, these weak lowland trees may struggle fondly for the last remnants of life, and send up feeble saplings again from their roots when they are cut down. But we builders with the sword perish boldly; our dying shall be perfect and solemn, as our warring; we give up our lives without reluctance, and for

ever.

I wish the reader to fix his attention for a moment on these two great characters of the pine,-its straightness and rounded perfectness; both wonderful, and in their issue lovely, though they have hitherto prevented the tree from being drawn. first, its straightness. Because we constantly see it in the wildest scenery, we are apt to remember only as characteristic examples of it those which have been disturbed by violent accident or disease. Of course such instances are frequent. The soil of the pine is subject to continual change; perhaps the rock in which

it is rooted splits in frost and falls forward, throwing the young stems aslope; or the whole mass of earth around it is undermined by rain; or a huge bowlder falls on its stem from above, and forces it for twenty years to grow with weight of a couple of tons leaning on its side. Hence, especially at edges of loose cliffs, about waterfalls, or at glacier banks, and in other places liable to disturbance, the pine may be seen distorted and oblique; and in Turner's Source of the Arveron,' he has, with his usual unerring perception of the main point in any matter, fastened on this means of relating the glacier's history. The glacier cannot explain its own motion, and ordinary observers saw in it only its rigidity; but Turner saw that the wonderful thing was its non-rigidity. Other ice is fixed, only this ice stirs. All the banks are staggering beneath its waves, crumbling and withered as by the blast of a perpetual storm. He made the rocks of his foreground loose-rolling and tottering down together; the pines, smitten aside by them, their tops dead, bared by the ice wind. Nevertheless, this is not the truest or universal expression of the pine's character. said long ago, even of Turner: « Into the spirit of the pine he cannot enter." He understood the glacier at once: he had seen the force of sea on shore too often to

miss the action of those crystal-crested waves. But the pine was strange to him, adverse to his delight in broad and flowing line; he refused its magnificent erectness. Magnificent!- nay, sometimes, almost terrible. Other trees, tufting crag or hill, yield to the form and sway of the ground; clothe it with soft compliance; are partly its subjects, partly its flatterers, partly its comforters. But the pine rises in serene resistance, self-contained; nor can I ever without awe stay long under a great Alpine cliff, far from all house or work of men, looking up to its companies of pine, as they stand on the inaccessible juts and perilous ledges of the enormous wall, in quiet multitudes, each like the shadow of the one beside it-upright, fixed, spectral as troops of ghosts standing on the walls of Hades, not knowing each otherdumb for ever. You cannot reach them, cannot cry to them: those trees never heard human voice; they are far above all sound but of the winds. No foot ever stirred fallen leaf of theirs. All comfortless they stand, between the two eternities of the Vacancy and the Rock: yet with such iron will that the rock itself looks bent and shattered beside them,-fragile, weak, inconsistent,

compared to their dark energy of delicate life, and monotony of enchanted pride; - unnumbered, unconquerable.

Then note, farther, their perfectness. The impression on most people's minds must have been received more from pictures than reality, so far as I can judge, so ragged they think the pine; whereas its chief character in health is green and full roundness. It stands compact, like one of its own cones, slightly curved on its sides, finished and quaint as a carved tree in some Elizabethan garden; and instead of being wild in expression, forms the softest of all forest scenery: for other trees show their trunks and twisting boughs; but the pine, growing either in luxuriant mass or in happy isolation, allows no branch to be seen. Summit behind summit rise its pyramidal ranges, or down to the very grass sweep the circlets of its boughs; so that there is nothing but green cone and green carpet. Nor is it only softer, but in one sense more cheerful than other foliage; for it casts only a pyramidal shadow. Lowland forest arches overhead, and checkers the ground with darkness; but the pine, growing in scattered groups, leaves the glades between emerald-bright. Its gloom is all its own; narrowing into the sky, it lets the sunshine. strike down to the dew. And if ever a superstitious feeling comes over me among the pine glades, it is never tainted with the old German forest fear, but is only a more solemn tone of the fairy enchantment that haunts our English meadows; so that I have always called the prettiest pine gláde in Chamouni, "Fairies' Hollow." It is in the glen beneath the steep ascent above Pont Pelissier, and may be reached by a little winding path which goes down from the top of the hill; being indeed not truly a glen, but a broad ledge of moss and turf, leaning in a formidable precipice (which however the gentle branches hide) over the Arve. An almost isolated rock promontory, manycolored, rises at the end of it. On the other sides it is bordered by cliffs, from which a little cascade falls, literally down among the pines; for it is so light, shaking itself into mere showers of seed pearl in the sun, that the pines don't know it from mist, and grow through it without minding. Underneath, there is only the mossy silence; and above, for ever, the snow of the nameless Aiguille.

And then the third character which I want you to notice in the pine is its exquisite fineness. Other trees rise against the

*

sky in dots and knots, but this in fringes." You never see the edges of it, so subtle are they; and for this reason, it alone of trees, so far as I know, is capable of the fiery change which we saw before had been noticed by Shakespeare. When the sun rises behind a ridge crested with pine,-provided the ridge be at a distance of about two miles, and seen clear,- all the trees, for about three or four degrees on each side of the sun, become trees of light, seen in clear flame against the darker sky, and dazzling as the sun itself. I thought at first this was owing to the actual lustre of the leaves; but I believe now it is caused by the cloud dew upon them,-every minutest leaf carrying its diamond. It seems as if these trees, living always among the clouds, had caught part of their glory from them; and, themselves the darkest of vegetation, could yet add splendor to the sun itself.

Yet I have been more struck by their character of finished delicacy at a distance from the central Alps, among the pastoral hills of the Emmenthal or lowland districts of Berne; where they are set in groups between the cottages, whose shingle roofs

* Keats (as is his way) puts nearly all that may be said of the pine into one verse, though they are only figurative pines of which he is speaking. I have come to that pass of admiration for him now, that I dare not read him, so discontented he makes me with my own work; but others must not leave unread, in considering the influence of trees upon the human soul, that marvelous ode to Psyche. Here is the piece about pines:—

"Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane

In some untrodden region of my mind,

Where branchèd thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,

Instead of pines, shall murmur in the wind:

Far, far around shall those dark-clustered trees

Fledge the wild-ridgèd mountains, steep by steep;

And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,

The moss-lain Dryads shall be lulled to sleep;

And in the midst of this wide quietness

A rosy sanctuary will I dress

With the wreathed trellis of a working brain,

With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the Gardener Fancy e'er could feign,
Who, breeding flowers, will never breed the same.
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win;

A bright torch, and a casement ope, at night,
To let the warm Love in."

(they also of pine) of deep gray blue, and lightly carved fronts, golden and orange in the autumn sunshine, gleam on the banks and lawns of hillside,- endless lawns, mounded and studded and bossed all over with deeper green hay heaps, orderly set, like jewelry (the mountain hay, when the pastures are full of springs, being strangely dark and fresh in verdure for a whole day after it is cut). And amidst this delicate delight of cottage and field, the young pines stand delicatest of all, scented as with frankincense, their slender stems straight as arrows, and crystal white, looking as if they would break with a touch, like needles; and their arabesques of dark leaf pierced through and through by the pale radiance of clear sky, opal blue, where they follow each other along the soft hill ridges, up and down.

I have watched them in such scenes with the deeper interest, because of all trees they have hitherto had most influence on human character. The effect of other vegetation, however great, has been divided by mingled species: elm and oak in England, poplar in France, birch in Scotland, olive in Italy and Spain, share their power with inferior trees, and with all the changing charm of successive agriculture. But the tremendous unity of the pine absorbs and molds the life of a race. The pine shadows rest upon a nation. The Northern peoples, century after century, lived under one or other of the two great powers of the Pine and the Sea, both infinite. They dwelt amidst the forests, as they wandered on the waves, and saw no end, nor any other horizon; - still the dark-green trees, or the dark-green waters, jagged the dawn with their fringe or their foam. And whatever elements of imagination, or of warrior strength, or of domestic justice, were brought down by the Norwegian and the Goth against the dissoluteness or degradation of the South of Europe, were taught them under the green roofs and wild penetralia of the pine.

LEAVES MOTIONLESS
From Modern Painters >

L

EAVES motionless. The strong pines wave above them, and the weak grasses tremble beside them: but the blue stars rest upon the earth with a peace as of heaven; and far along the ridges of iron rock, moveless as they, the rubied crests of Alpine rose flush in the low rays of morning. Nor these yet