134 East and West 
to Nature was less practical and more poetic, 
than with the present age when it is so com- 
pletely utilitarian. 
We have lost the ancient and poetic rela- 
tion to trees, as we have lost some of the 
gods. The Period of the Gods was also the 
Age of Trees, and it is as if the spirits which 
once inhabited trees had departed, unable, 
like the gods themselves, to withstand such 
change and progress in the world, and leav- 
ing us only so much lumber. But if per- 
chance you have a mythologic vein in you, a 
certain feeling for Nature, as of something 
personal—an inheritance from the gods it 
may be—you may still feel that reverence for 
trees, for the plane, the tulip, and the walnut, 
which so distinguished the ancients, and be- 
cause of this ancestral superstition, derive 
more from communion with your tree friends 
than can one less poetically endowed or more 
completely hypnotised by the modern spirit. 
Now the personality of California—of the 
coast country in particular—is expressed as 
much in the live oak as in any natural fea- 
ture. The Western live oak is a charm as 
essentially Californian as the soft voice is 
Southern. More native to the soil than the 
inhabitants, it is a tangible expression of this 
