2l8 
PLANT-LORE OF SHAKESPEARE 
(9) You may as well forbid tlie mountain Pines 
To wag their high tops and to make no noise, 
When they are fretten with the gusts of heaven. 
Merchant of Venice , iv. 1, 75. 
(10) Ay me ! the bark peel’d from the lofty Pine, 
His leaves will wither, and his sap decay ; 
So must my soul, her bark being peel’d away.— Lucrece, 1167. 
In No. 8 is one of those delicate touches which show Shake¬ 
speare’s keen observation of nature, in the effect of the rising 
sun upon a group of Pine trees. Mr. Ruskin says that with 
the one exception of Wordsworth, no other English poet has 
noticed this. Wordsworth’s lines occur in one of his minor 
poems on leaving Italy— 
“ J\fy thoughts become bright like yon edging of Pines 
On the steep’s lofty verge—how it blackened the air! 
But touched from behind by the sun, it now shines 
With threads that seem part of its own silver hair.” 
While Mr. Ruskin’s account of it is this : “ When the sun rises 
behind a ridge of Pines, and 
those Pines are seen from a 
distance of a mile or two against 
his light, the whole form of the 
tree, trunk, branches and all, 
becomes one frost-work of 
intensely brilliant silver, which 
is relieved against the clear sky 
like a burning fringe, for some 
distance on either side of the 
sun .”—Stones of Venice , i. 240. 
The Pine is the established 
emblem of everything that is 
“ high and lifted up,” but always 
with a suggestion of dreariness 
and solitude. So it is used by 
Shakespeare and by Milton, who always associated the Pine 
with mountains; and so it has always been used by the poets, 
even down to our own day. Thus Tennyson— 
