sombre, rooted in the litter of a thousand years, hushed, and corrective
to the spirit. The trail passes insensibly into them from the black
pines and a thin belt of firs. You look back as you rise, and strain for
glimpses of the tawny valley, blue glints of the Bitter Lake, and tender
cloud films on the farther ranges. For such pictures the pine branches
make a noble frame. Presently they close in wholly; they draw
mysteriously near, covering your tracks, giving up the trail
indifferently, or with a secret grudge. You get a kind of impatience
with their locked ranks, until you come out lastly on some high, windy
dome and see what they are about. They troop thickly up the open ways,
river banks, and brook borders; up open swales of dribbling springs;
swarm over old moraines; circle the peaty swamps and part and meet about
clean still lakes; scale the stony gullies; tormented, bowed, persisting
to the door of the storm chambers, tall priests to pray for rain. The
spring winds lift clouds of pollen dust, finer than frankincense, and
trail it out over high altars, staining the snow. No doubt they
understand this work better than we; in fact they know no other. "Come,"
say the churches of the valleys, after a season of dry years, "let us
pray for rain." They would do better to plant more trees.

It is a pity we have let the gift of lyric improvisation die out.
Sitting islanded on some gray peak above the encompassing wood, the soul
is lifted up to sing the Iliad of the pines. They have no voice but the
wind, and no sound of them rises up to the high places. But the waters,
the evidences of their power, that go down the steep and stony ways, the
outlets of ice-bordered pools, the young rivers swaying with the force
of their running, they sing and shout and trumpet at the falls, and the
noise of it far outreaches the forest spires. You see from these conning
towers how they call and find each other in the slender gorges; how they
fumble in the meadows, needing the sheer nearing walls to give them
countenance and show the way; and how the pine woods are made glad by
them.

Nothing else in the streets of the mountains gives such a sense of
pageantry as the conifers; other trees, if there are any, are home
dwellers, like the tender fluttered, sisterhood of quaking asp. They
grow in clumps by spring borders, and all their stems have a permanent
curve toward the down slope, as you may also see in hillside pines,
where they have b