at by the top doth take the mountain Pine,
And make him stoop to the vale.

_Cymbeline_, act iv, sc. 2 (174).

(7) _1st Lord._

Behind the tuft of Pines I met them.

_Winter's Tale_, act ii, sc. 1 (33).

(8) _Richard._

But when from under this terrestrial ball
He fires the proud top of the eastern Pines.

_Richard II_, act iii, sc. 2 (41).

(9) _Antonio._

You may as well forbid the mountain Pines
To wag their high tops and to make no noise,
When they are fretten with the gusts of heaven.

_Merchant of Venice_, act iv, sc. 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 Shakespeare'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--

"My 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--

"They came, they cut away my tallest Pines--
My dark tall Pines, that plumed the craggy ledge--
High o'er the blue gorge, and all between
The snowy peak and snow-white cataract
Fostere