148 CEDARS 
(Sus-rrine LARICEA—continued) 
Section CEDARS 
In the midst 
A cedar spread his dark-green layers of shade. 
TENNYSON, Gardener's Daughter. 
If trees were adjudged upon their appearances and 
divided into two classes, pretty and majestic, the 
Cedar of Lebanon would pre-eminently find its place 
in the ranks of the latter. 
It is a tree that has been written of by poets and 
writers, of all ages, in many countries. It has been 
sung of in David’s Psalms and Bible verse. A halo 
of sacred association surrounds its patriarchal head.. 
It is a tree that was regarded by Biblical writers as 
an emblem of strength, and the look of the tree as it 
is presented to us, with its short thick trunk, its 
massive branches breaking out from it like muscular 
arms, suggests the sculptured strength of the statue 
known as the Farnese Hercules rather than the figure, 
with its more graceful and slimmer lines, of the 
Apollo Belvedere. 
While the branches of most trees spring from the 
trunk, in the case of the Cedar, as in the Oak, they 
seem rather to divide from the trunk and carry 
away with them some of its substance. Both Oaks 
and Cedars, with their fortes ramos (stout branches), 
and ingentem umbram (expansive spread), fulfil. the 
Virgilian idea of mightiness in forest trees. 
“The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars of 
Lebanon,” so wrote Isaiah, and his expressions: and 
figures of speech concede to it the strongest power 
that imagination and illustration at that day could 
offer. 
The prophet priest and Jewish exile in Chaldean 
land, Ezekiel, describes it as a tree “‘ with shadowing 
