A SPRAY OF PINE. 47 



" The pines were dark on Ramoth hill, 

 Their song was soft and low, 

 The blossoms in the sweet May wind 

 Were falling like the snow." 



Lowell's " To a Pine-Tree " is well known, 



" Far up on Katahdin thou towerest 



Purple-blue with the distance and vast ; 



Like a cloud o'er the lowlands thou lowerest, 

 That hangs poised on a lull in the blast 



To its fall leaning awful." 



In his " A Mood," his attention is absorbed by this 

 tree, and in the poet's quest of the muse, he says, 



"I haunt the pine-dark solitudes, 

 With soft brown silence carpeted." 



But the real white pine among our poets is Emer- 

 son. Against that rustling deciduous background of 

 the New England poets, he shows dark and aspiring, 

 Emerson seems to have a closer fellowship with the 

 pine than with any other tree, and it recurs again and 

 again in his poems. In his " Garden," the pine is 

 the principal vegetable, " the snow-loving pines," as 

 he so aptly says, and " the hemlocks tall, untamable." 

 It is perhaps from the pine that he gets the idea that 

 " Nature loves the number five ; " its leaves are in 

 fives and its whorl of branches is composed of five. 

 His warbler is the " pine warbler," and he sees " the 

 pigeons in the pines," where they are seldom to be 

 seen. He even puts a " pine state-house " in his 

 " Boston Hymn." 



But more than that, his " Woodnotes," one of hii 



