May Cones of Pine. 169 



XXXII. 



Cones of Pine The Author audaciously Plagiarizes Quotation from 

 Sir A. Helps A Pine-wood Sycamore-maple 'Les Boeufs,' by 

 Pierre Dupont Holly Flowers of Bird-cherry and Holly. 



JUST before the middle of May the pines are begin- 

 ning to form their cones, which, at a little distance, 

 have a powerful effect upon the color. At this time 

 they are just disengaging themselves from the brown 

 covering, and are of a light and cheerful green ; how- 

 ever, the brown still dominates, especially at a distance. 

 There is scarcely any thing in Nature to be compared 

 with a pine-wood, I think. Now, this sentence which 

 I have just written is not my own, but a piece of down- 

 right audacious plagiarism from a very eminent author, 

 who wrote ' Companions of my Solitude,' and whose 

 charming thoughts have become companions to enliven 

 the solitude of many other persons beside himself ; and 

 in that book any ingenious critic, keen to detect a 

 larceny, may find the above sentence printed word for 

 word. I ought, no doubt, to have honestly written 

 it as a quotation with inverted commas, but as the 

 opinion it expresses is just as much my own as his I 

 prefer to appropriate it absolutely. But as one cannot 

 exactly steal a whole paragraph or page, I will now 

 proceed to quote a passage which has always seemed 

 to me one of the most complete expressions of the syl- 

 van influence on the mind of a thinking creature: 



