The White Pine is a tree that harmonizes with all situations, rude
and cultivated, level and abrupt. On the side of the mountain it adds
grandeur to the declivity, and gives a look of sweeter tranquillity to
the green pastoral meadow. It yields a darker frown to the projecting
cliff, and a more awful uncertainty to the mountain-pass or the hollow
ravine. Amid desolate scenery it spreads a cheerfulness that detracts
nothing from its power over the imagination, while it relieves it of its
terrors by presenting a green bulwark to defend us from the elements.
Nothing can be more cheerful in scenery than the occasional groups of
Pines which have come up spontaneously on the bald hills near our coast,
elsewhere a dreary waste of gray rocks, stunted shrubbery, and prostrate
Juniper. In the forest the White Pine constitutes the very sanctuary of
Nature, its tall pillars extending into the clouds, and its broad canopy
of foliage mixing with the vapors that descend in the storm.
Such are its picturesque aspects: but in a figurative light it may be
regarded as a true symbol of benevolence. Under its outspread roof,
thousands of otherwise unprotected animals, nestling in the bed of dry
leaves which it has spread upon the ground, find shelter and repose. The
squirrel subsists upon the kernels obtained from its cones; the rabbit
browses upon the Trefoil and the spicy foliage of the Hypericum which
are protected in its conservatory of shade; and the fawn reposes on its
brown couch of leaves, unmolested by the outer tempest.
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