It is the one tree of all others that profoundly
suggests, every time the light falls upon it or the wind stirs through
it, THE THINGS THAT MAN CANNOT TOUCH. Woven out of air and sunlight
and its shred of dust, it always seems to stand the monument of the
woods, to The Intangible, and The Invisible, to the spirituality of
matter. Who shall find a tree that looks down upon the spirit of the
pine? And who, who has ever looked upon the pines--who has seen them
climbing the hills in crowds, drinking at the sun--has not felt that
however we may take to them personally they are the Chosen People
among the trees? To pass from the voice of them to the voice of the
common leaves is to pass from the temple to the street. In the rest of
the forest all the leaves seem to be full of one another's din--of
rattle and chatter--heedless, happy chaos, but in the pines the voice
of every pine-spill is as a chord in the voice of all the rest, and
the whole solemn, measured chant of it floats to us as the voice of
the sky itself. It is as if all the mystical, beautiful far-things
that human spirits know had come from the paths of Space, and from the
presence of God, to sing in the tree-trunks over our heads.

Now it seems to me that the supremacy of the pine in the imagination
is not that it is more beautiful in itself than other trees, but that
the beauty of the pine seems more symbolic than other beauty, and
symbolic of more and of greater things. It is full of the sturdiness
and strength of the ground, but it is of all trees the tree to see the
sky with, and its voice is the voice of the horizons, the voice of the
marriage of the heavens and the earth; and not only is there more of
the sky in it, and more of the kingdom of the air and of the place of
Sleep, but there is more of the fiber and odor from the solemn heart
of the earth. No other tree can be mutilated like the pine by the hand
of man and still keep a certain earthy, unearthly dignity and beauty
about it and about all the place where it stands. A whole row of them,
with their left arms cut off for passing wires, standing severe and
stately, their bare trunks against heaven, cannot help being
beautiful. The beauty is symbolic and infinite. It cannot be taken
away. If the entire street-side of a row of common, ordinary
middle-class trees were cut away there would be nothing to do with the
maimed and helpless things but to cut them down--remove their misery
from all men's sight.