THE MESSAGE OF THE TREES

"What are these maples and beeches and birches but odes and idyls and madrigals? What are these pines and firs and spruces but holy hymns?"

Oliver Wendell Holmes.

THE VOICE OF THE PINE

"Tis night upon the lake. Our bed of boughs
Is built where, high above, the pine-tree soughs.
'Tis still-and yet what woody noises loom
Against the background of the silent gloom!
One well might hear the opening of a flower
If day were hushed as this. A mimic shower
Just shaken from a branch, how large it sounded,
As 'gainst our canvas roof its three drops bounded!
Across the rumpling waves the hoot-owl's bark
Tolls forth the midnight hour upon the dark.
What mellow booming from the hills doth come?-
The mountain quarry strikes its mighty drum.

Long had we lain beside our pine-wood fire,
From things of sport our talk had risen higher.
How frank and intimate the words of men
When tented lonely in some forest glen!

No dallying now with masks, from whence emerges
Scarce one true feature forth. The night-wind urges
To straight and simple speech. So we had thought
Aloud; no secrets but to light were brought.
The hid and spiritual hopes, the wild

Unreasoned longings that, from child to child,
Mortals still cherish (though with modern shame)—
To these, and things like these, we gave a name;
And as we talked, the intense and resinous fire
Lit up the towering boles, till nigh and nigher
They gather round, a ghostly company,

Like beasts who seek to know what men may be.

Then to our hemlock beds, but not to sleep-
For listening to the stealthy steps that creep
About the tent, or falling branch, but most
A noise was like the rustling of a host,
Or like the sea that breaks upon the shore-

It was the pine-tree's murmur. More and more
It took a human sound. These words I felt
Into the skyey darkness float and melt:-
"Heardst thou these wanderers reasoning of a time
When men more near the Eternal One shall climb
How like the new-born child who cannot tell
A mother's arm that wraps it warm and well!
Leaves of His rose; drops in His sea that flow,-
Are they, alas, so blind they may not know
Here in this breathing world of joy and fear,
They can no nearer get to God than here?"

Richard Watson Gilder.

WOODNOTES

As sunbeams stream through liberal space
And nothing jostle or displace,

So waved the pine-tree through my thought
And fanned the dreams it never brought.

'What prizes the town and the tower?
Only what the pine-tree yields;

Sinew that subdued the fields;

The wild-eyed boy, who in the woods
Chants his hymn to hills and floods,
Whom the city's poisoning spleen
Made not pale, or fat, or lean;

Whom the rain and the wind purgeth,

Whom the dawn and the day-star urgeth,
In whose cheek the rose-leaf blusheth,

In whose feet the lion rusheth,

Iron arms, and iron mould,

That know not fear, fatigue or cold.

I give my rafters to his boat,

My billets to his boiler's throat,
And I will swim the ancient sea

To float my child to victory,

And grant to dwellers with the pine
Dominion o'er the palm and vine.

Who leaves the pine-tree, leaves his friend,
Unnerves his strength, invites his end.

Cut a bough from my parent stem,
And dip it in thy porcelain vase;
A little while each russet gem

Will swell and rise with wonted grace;
But when it seeks enlarged supplies,
The orphan of the forest dies.
Whoso walks in solitude

And inhabiteth the wood,

Choosing light, wave, rock and bird,
Before the money-loving herd,

Into that forester shall pass,

From these companions power and grace.

'Heed the old oracles

Ponder my spells;

Song wakes in my pinnacles

When the wind swells.

Soundeth the prophetic wind,

The shadows shake on the rock behind,
And the countless leaves of the pine are strings
Tuned to the lay the wood-god sings.

Hearken! Hearken!

If thou wouldst know the mystic song
Chanted when the sphere was young.
Aloft, abroad, the paean swells;

O wise man! hear'st thou half it tells?

O wise man! hear'st thou the least part? "Tis the chronicle of art.

To the open ear it sings

Sweet the genesis of things,

Of tendency through endless ages,

Of star-dust and star-pilgrimages,

Of rounded worlds, of space and time,

Of the old flood's subsiding slime,

Of chemic matter, force and form,

Of poles and powers, cold, wet and warm:
The rushing metamorphosis
Dissolving all that fixture is,

Melts things that be to things that seem,
And solid nature to a dream.
O, listen to the undersong,
The ever old, the ever young;