A SPRAY OF PINE 43 



" 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 fellow- 

 ship 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 

 his longest poems, is mainly the notes of the pine. 



