FLORA OP THE MOUNTAIN. 225 



with a height of 130 feet. These vast towers of woody fibre 

 are the records of ages of labor of the vegetable life-powers, 

 reclaiming the carbon, earth, and water of the world from 

 chaotic floating. They fill the observer with astonishment, 

 their massive forms, "like pillared props of heaven," sug- 

 gesting the limbs of "Atlas, whose brawny back supports 

 the starry skies." Their scraggy and rugged trunks give 

 more the idea of rocky shafts than trees, and, like granite 

 needles or stone obelisks, they seem to say they will stand 

 forever. The lumber of this tree is of great value. 



PINUS STROBUS. The white pine, like the hemlock, is scat- 

 tered over the whole mountain in almost every position, rocky 

 height, or ravine, but only prevails in extensive continuous 

 groves along the valleys of the streams, or the cold undulating 

 surfaces of the table-lands. It grows in dense close-set masses, 

 which have an expression, sui generis, from the specific shape 

 or style of the tree. It is the loftiest of our indigenous 

 trees, quoted by some of the books at from 80 to 100 feet, 

 but in primitive mountain forests its straight thin columns 

 often attain a height of nearly 200 feet, with an exceedingly 

 narrow diametric base. These small, tapering stems look like 

 masts of ships or lightning-rods, their delicate hair-leaf 

 foliage giving the appearance of green mist in their tallest 

 boughs, the whole woods waving like a grove of colossal 

 plumes in the wind. The sharp, tapering summits of these 

 trees do not intercept the rays of light as occurs in the 

 interlocked canopy of the hemlock forests, but give a green 

 and airy lightness, diffused through their densest groves, with- 

 out the oppressive sense of shade and darkness which pre- 

 vail on surfaces covered by their more gloomy brother. 



When the white pine grows scattered in forests of other 

 trees, it does not shoot up in single thin stems, but fre- 

 quently forks or divides into groups of stems, which spring 

 generally from a single, massive, knotty stump, or short 

 trunk, which rises alone from the earth. The size of this 

 basis or pedestal of the miniature forest above is often of 

 enormous dimension and exceedingly irregular in contour, 



