July 17. 1915. 
LAND AND WATER. 
THE PINE WOOD. 
By J. D. 
To random faucy tlie pine, more perhaps than any 
other member of the forest parliament, is brimful 
of suggestion. If the companion of your walk be 
learned in the science of trees, he will eut'ert^Tin 
you by the hour with an exact account of the pine 
which has all the variety and charm of a romance, ranging 
from hemisphere to hemisphere. If he be a man of letters, 
this tree will serve as his guide-post along a pleasant path of 
allusion beginning with Theocritus and ending with the 
musical close of Carlyle's essay on Burns, that vision of tlie 
northern poet's song as a Valclutha fountain beside which 
the traveller halts "to muse among its rocks and pines." 
Amid a thousand references he will not forget how Pliny com- 
pared the ominous cloud over Vesuvius to an Italian stone- 
pine, nor that "spray of western pine" which Bret Harto 
laid upon the grave cf Dickens. Sublimest of all uses of the 
pine in literature is Milton's, where he takes it as the standard 
by which to measure Satan's spear. 
The first note of the Sicilian-Alexandrian poet is borne 
upon the whisper of the pine, and Theocritus is not alcno 
among ancient singers in his sense of the peculiar Aeolian 
music of this tree, which is more soft and continuous than in 
those of richer foliage. To his shepherds and goat-herds the 
pine is a friend, a playmate even that pelts them with its 
cones, as they lie idle beneath its scanty shade. Children 
these Sicilians were, and children throughout the ages have 
found in pine-cones a delightful toy of many uses. Tho 
Scottish rustic cliild personifies them as sheep and arranges 
them in flocks. To him the word " cone" would convey no 
meaning. They are his " yowies," that is, "little ewes," 
and known by that name alone, even when they serve other 
fancies. To-day, no doubt, they march in ordered battalions 
of Allies and enemy. 
Manifold are the gifts of the pine; timber for ships, and 
pitch to caulk their seams; the framework of the house; in 
ancient days, the torch to light the hall. The painter owes 
it an indispensable material of his art or craft; the physician 
of these later days prescribes its fragrant balsams either as 
distilled by the chemist or inhaled upon the free air beside 
the healing wood itself. Without the resin of pine the violin 
is dumb. But these are questions for the encyclopaedist, and 
apart from the purpose of these desultory lines. 
For the pine-wood that set its name to tho title is no 
generality, but a particular and very gracious incident of a 
certain country-side. It is in an especial sense an incident, 
for the county is famous for another tree, which has sup- 
plied the advertising pamphleteer of holiday rambles with an 
apt alliterative nickname for the district. Our pine-wood is 
exotic, and thereby gains something in charm, which is all 
the greater by a peculiarity of situation. If it stood alone, it 
would still be remarkable and a very delightful variant of tho 
landscape, a somewhat austsre qualification of a perhaps too 
opulent English woodland. But it does not stand alone, it 
is, in fact, concealed; from no point does it emerge upon the 
view with that commanding silhouette which in the High- 
lands gives the group of pines its rugged and wind-tossed 
mystery. For it is a wood within a wood. 
Some forester, a generation or two ago, had the happy 
inspiration to relieve the monotony of abundant beeches 
v.ith a plantation of pine, set down without break or pause 
beside the other trees. When you enter (he wood, you do not 
eu8]>ect the sudden contrast in store. For about a mile the 
path, soft as snow in fallen beech leaves, winds through a 
maze of grey stems carrying a filigree of tho most delicate 
foliage. Then the ground dips into a deep dingle, which still 
continues, on its further ascent, the " melodious plot cf 
beechen green and shadows numberless." The beech weed 
seems interminable, and in spring, when the hyacjnth 
shimmers above the russet carpet, it« seeming endlessness is 
more than half its charm. But the top of the ascent once 
gained, a single foot-step leads you into a new world. You 
have passed from a pavilion into a cathedral. 
To some natures the solemnity cf the pine is forbidding. 
In those whose earliest associations are of the plains, east or 
west, v/here those trees fringe the horizon with tern and 
ragged arms, flung athwart a leaden sky, this feeling may be 
understood. But those who know the pine cf the northern 
hills, in all its variation from dark spruce to fairy larch, or 
the maa.sed contrast of its canopy beside the sea of Naples 
and the two Sicilies, its solitary relief which Turner loved to 
paint, find it the friendliest of trees. Thsocritus celebrated 
the cak as well, but his landscape is inseparable froin the 
pine; which his shepherd Comatas praises above the olive 
Synion. 
beneath which Lacon reclines and boasts of his good fortune. 
And even here, far away from the warmth and glamour of 
Sicily, with her sea and her fountains, the pine brings into 
the English landscape a bint of Thoocritean song. 
So, one could imagine, at the point where our two woods 
join, with no other boundary mark than the change from 
fallen beech-leaves to the even softer carpet of withered 
needles of pine underlcct, might another rustic Lacon and 
Comatas disput-e in verse the clainss of their several resting- 
places, Lacon in the beech wood and Comatas beneath the 
neighbouring pines. And the last word would be again with 
Comatas : 
" That way will I not go, sweetly here the bees are hum- 
ming. There are tv.o wells of water clear and cold, on the 
tree the birds are warbling, and the shadow is be3-oud com- 
pare with that wherein thou liest, and from on high the pine- 
tree pelts us with her cones." 
But such a contest must to-day remain a thing of fancy 
only. Hodge and Giles, whatever poetic stirrings they may 
feel, refuse to carry on the tradition of the impromptu battla 
of wits and verses. Insular reserve, holds then dumb, and 
any overbold singers who tried the experiment would seem 
to our rustic worthies only fit and proper persciis to be " cer- 
tified " and "put away," phrases of ominous .significance 
whereon it is unnecessary to enlarge. Mr. Pope has put the 
whole matter in a nutshell, not without some support to th« 
\iew of Hodge and Giles. 
On ordinary days one usually has the pine wood to 
oneself, but on Sundays and holidays the single path, which 
oificial instructions say nius.t be strictly kept, is alive with 
strollers. Something in its larger air, or the convenience 
of fallen tree-trunks, makes it a haltiug-plaoe for those way- 
farers, who seldom seem inclined to linger under the neigh- 
bouring beeches. Bolder spirits, defiant of authority, have 
even been known to picnic under those .soaring aisles, that 
lead the eye upward and upward, to new glimpses of sky 
and cloud. And the grouping of the bare stems has its 
peculiar magic, a curious incomm.unicable fascination, an 
intensified version, as it were, of the clustsred lances in 
Velasquez's " Surrender of Breda." 
Like its own needles, the charm of the pine wood u 
evergreen. At no hour or season does it fail of beauty and 
fragrance. Under our infreq(ient snows and a red winter 
sunset it suggests the solitudes of the Far West; when th« 
bracken is brown in late autumn it seems some little am- 
bassadorial plot of the Scottish Highlands, set down in 
demurer England. If the red deer were to bound across th» 
path you would not be surprised, and at all times, so sharp 
is the likeness to liue north, you seek subconsciously through 
the more opan vistas for glimpses of mountain peaks, and 
look in vain for that melting blue which cicses the distances 
of forests far away. That is awanting in its intensity, 
although the southern landscape has its own ethereal charm of 
receding distance, but never quite the same miracle of colour 
as is wrought among the hills. 
Another accessoiy sought and missed is the brown 
mountain torrent, but it were unfair to allow national instinct 
to stretch the parallel too far. Ungrateful, too, fcr the pine- 
wood of the south, this stranger of the forest, is all the mora 
gracious that she is exotic. Here, as she starts unlocked 
for from her beechen screen, she speaks with a new accent; 
she adds, as the wind sweeps through her branches, an un- 
familiar and slightly bizarre note to the symphony of tho 
forest. And as we listen to that note, awakened by tho 
light summer airs, we come back once more to the poet with 
whom we set out. " Sweet, meseems, is the whispering stir 
of yonder pine tree, goatherd, that murmurs by the welh cf 
water." No translation (net even Andrew Lang's, here 
twice borrowed) can give in its perfection that miracle of 
sound, for the original has a word that imitates with exquisite 
aKsonance the \ery music cf this vccal tree. The man of 
science will explain to you minutely how it is that (he needle- 
foliage prcduces just this distinctive note, and he is not un- 
interesting; but the ancient poet reproduces the sound itself, 
and makes the pines of all ages and all countries kin. AVhaS 
we hear in the English wcod to-day Theocritus en .brined two 
thousand years ago in a vccal record. Save the mark, the 
word " record " is in this ccnnection of acouttics somewhat 
modern and incongiucus. Let us hasten to erase it; ftr an 
impulse from a vernal wood should teach rather of man tliari 
of the machine. Yet to this favour has an age of mecLanism 
corool 
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