es, tufting crag or hill, yield to the form and sway of the ground,
clothe it with soft compliance, are partly its subjects, partly its
flatterers, partly its comforters. But the pine rises in serene
resistance, self-contained; nor can I ever without awe stay long under
a great Alpine cliff, far from all house or work of men, looking up to
its companies of pines, as they stand on the inaccessible juts and
perilous ledges of the enormous wall, in quiet multitudes, each like
the shadow of the one beside it--upright, fixed, spectral, as troops
of ghosts standing on the walls of Hades, not knowing each other, dumb
for ever. You cannot reach them, cannot cry to them: those trees never
heard human voice; they are far above all sound but of the winds. No
foot ever stirred fallen leaf of theirs: all comfortless they stand,
between the two eternities of the Vacancy and the Rock; yet with such
iron will, that the rock itself looks bent and shattered beside
them,--fragile, weak, inconsistent, compared to their dark energy of
delicate life, and monotony of enchanted pride--unnumbered,
unconquerable.

Then note farther their perfectness. The impression on most people's
minds must have been received more from pictures than reality, so far
as I can judge, so ragged they think the pine; whereas its chief
character in health is green and full _roundness_. It stands compact,
like one of its own cones, slightly curved on its sides, finished and
quaint as a carved tree in some Elizabethan garden; and instead of
being wild in expression, forms the softest of all forest scenery, for
other trees show their trunks and twisting boughs; but the pine,
growing either in luxuriant mass, or in happy isolation, allows no
branch to be seen. Summit behind summit rise its pyramidal ranges, or
down to the very grass sweep the circlets of its boughs; so that there
is nothing but green cone, and green carpet. Nor is it only softer,
but in one sense more cheerful than other foliage, for it casts only a
pyramidal shadow. Lowland forest arches overhead, and chequers the
ground with darkness; but the pine, growing in scattered groups,
leaves the glades between emerald-bright. Its gloom is all its own;
narrowing into the sky, it lets the sunshine strike down to the dew.
And if ever a superstitious feeling comes over me among the pine
glades, it is never tainted with the old German forest fear, but it is
only a more solemn tone of the fairy enchantment that haun