But there was one point on which Ravenna, in my day at least (for it has suffered since then), yielded the palm to no Mediterranean port—the stately forest of stone-pines that stood like troops at rest, for miles along the shore. The stone-pine is always beautiful, whether as a solitary, striking up, one shaft of grace and strength, against the sky, or as in great companies sunk to the knees in the deep turfy mould that their needles have piled below them in the course of centuries. They grow thus in the south over many a green acre of Villa land, sheltering an unending profusion of the delicate wild flowers that thrive in that rich soil. But for real forests of stone-pines you must go farther north and skirt the coast. There you will see them in their glory, miles of them together, and if you are quiet and will listen, you will learn a great deal. For, like the sons of the prophets, they have secrets of their own that have never been shared with other tribes, secrets that have only been confided to them—and that is why the solitary pine is such a true solitary; he invites no companions from the gregarious world around: towering and alone, he seems to gaze at unseen horizons, to praise the Lord in the murmur of the far-spreading branches that crown the fretted column of his stem; as for Elijah on Mount Carmel, so for him the past and the present and the future blend unto one great chord of trusting acceptance that no passing storms can shatter, no warm caress lure from its allegiance. Have you, in some fleeting moment, caught the opening bars of an air that has haunted you afterwards for years, and then been led to where some great orchestra gave it to you in all its completeness? That was what happened to me when I first stood in the “Pineta” of Viareggio, and heard the full-voiced chant of the pines and the sea. I realized that they were part of one another, so to speak, that the whisper of the Villa pine in the south is an echo and a greeting brought by the wind from the family home in the north, where all the secrets of tree music are guarded as in some jealous ancient academy—no outsiders are ever privileged to carry them away! Psalms and marches and dirges, the wild call of the Laga, the C Major of the Te Deum, the wail of the De Profundis—the trees overhead and the surges on the shore will let you hear it all, and once heard it can never be forgotten.