The same spiritual trait, a kind of gentle persistent grudge against the infinite, shows itself in the not uncommon prejudice against pine trees. There are a great many people who have a way of saying pleasant things about pine trees and who like to drive through them or look at them in the landscape or have them on other people's hills, but they would not plant a pine tree near their houses or live with pines singing over them and watching them, every day and night, for the world. The mood of the pine is such a vast, still, hypnotic, imperious mood that there are very few persons, no matter how dull or unsusceptible they may seem to be, who are not as much affected by a single pine, standing in a yard by a doorway, as they are by a whole skyful of weather. If they are down on the infinite--they do not want a whole treeful of it around on the premises. And the pine comes as near to being infinite as anything purely vegetable, in a world like this, could expect. 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.