84

THE TYPE OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCHI.

bough are wreathed with fairy festoons of the most exqui

site design.

"Beautiful is the pine forest in the hour of calm,

'When all the forest leaves seemed stirred with prayer,'

and the prevailing silence is the more keenly felt because occasionally broken by the jubilant song of a passing bird. Beautiful in the agony of the storm, when a thousand strange and haunting voices echo through glade and avenue, and the grand old trees wrestle with the wind, as Jacob of old wrestled with the angel.

"I do not wonder," as Mr. Macmillan says, "that the northern imagination in heathen times should have invested it with awe and fear as the favourite haunt of Odin and Thor; or that, in after-times, its long rows of trunks, vanishing in the dim perspective, should have furnished designs for the aisles of Christian temples; and the sunset, streaming through its fretted branches, should have suggested the gorgeous painted window of the cathedral. It seems, most truly, a place made for worship; all its sentiments and associations are more or less sacred and solemn. Nature, with folded hands-to use Longfellow's fine expression-seems kneeling there in prayer. suredly it reminds us in various ways of the power, wisdom, and goodness of Him who thus spake by the mouth of His prophet I will plant in the wilderness the cedar, the fir tree, and the pine, and the box tree together: that they may see, and know, and consider, and understand together, that the hand of the Lord hath done this, and the Holy One of Israel hath created it.''

As

It is true, however, that even the pine forest has its

THE PRIMEVAL FOREST.

85

less poetical aspect. Lord Milton and Dr. Cheadle, in their graphic narrative of an expedition from the Atlantic to the Pacific,* across the Rocky Mountains, thus describe their experiences of the American wilderness :-" No one," they observe," who has not seen a primeval forest, where trees of gigantic size have grown and fallen undisturbed for ages, can form any idea of the collection of timber, or the impenetrable character of such a region. There were pines and thujas of every size, the patriarch of 300 feet in height standing alone, or thickly clustering groups of young ones struggling for the vacant place of some prostrate giant. The fallen trees lay piled around, forming barriers often six or eight feet high on every side; trunks of huge cedars, moss-grown and decayed, lay half-buried in the ground, on which others as mighty had recently fallen; trees still green and living, recently blown down, blocking the view with the walls of earth held in their matted roots; living trunks, dead trunks, rotten trunks; dry, barkless trunks, and trunks moist and green with moss; bare trunks and trunks with branches-prostrate, reclining, horizontal, propped up at different angles; timber of every size, in every stage of growth and decay, in every possible position, entangled in every possible combination. The swampy ground was densely covered with American dog-wood, and elsewhere with thickets of the aralea, a tough-stemmed trailer, with leaves as large as those of the rhubarb plant, and growing in many places as high as a man's shoulder."

I cannot leave the pine, however, without once more calling the reader's attention to those characteristic qualities

*The North-West Passage by Land.

86

BETWEEN TWO ETERNITIES.

which make it the very type of beauty as it is, to my mind, the monarch of trees.

A great writer* has pointed out, as the two chief characteristics of the pine, its straightness and rounded perfectness.

"Other trees"-as he observes, with all that eloquence of expression which renders his criticisms, even when one does not agree with them, such delightful reading—“ other trees, 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 severe resistance, self-contained; nor is it possible to stay long, without awe, under a great Alpine cliff, far from all house or work of men, looking up to its companies of pine, 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. 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."

The second distinguishing quality of the pine is its perfectness. It is so exquisitely green, its trunk so finely rounded, its compactness is so remarkable, and there is such a harmony and completeness about its pyramidal mass of branch and foliage! Instead of being wild in

* Ruskin.