But we are leaving the low-vaulted past. These trees are not to fall. They are to stand. In parks, we have provided for trees a refuge with ourselves. They are to live on, and with them we shall build more stately mansions for the soul. Trees have trials. They know what it is to struggle and grow strong. With hardship they build history, adventure, pathos, and poetry. Every tree has a life full of incident. Aged trees are stored with the lore of generations, carry the character of centuries, have biographies, stirring life-stories. A sequoia is an impressive wonder. As the oldest settler upon the earth--the pioneer of pioneers--it knows the stories of centuries. At the dead lips of the Sphinx you listen in vain, but beneath a Big Tree the ages speak and the centuries shift their scenes. The Big Trees carry within their untranslated scrolls that which may enrich the literature of the world. Within a Big Tree's brave breast are more materials of fact and fancy than in the ocean's coral cove, or in the murmuring sea-shell on the shore. In the forest, around the foot of a tree, rages an endless and ever-changing struggle for existence. Here from season unto season a thousand forms of life feed and frolic, live and love, fight and die. Here Nature's stirring drama is playing on and always on. Here are trials and triumphs, activity and repose, and all the woodland scenes upon the wild world's stage amid the splendors and the shadows of the pines. At this place Nature smiles and sings, and here, at times, the lonely echo seems to search and seek in vain. I never see a little tree bursting from the earth, peeping confidingly up among the withered leaves, without wondering how long it will live, what trials or triumphs it will have. I always hope that it will be a home for the birds. I always hope that it will find life worth living, and that it will live long to better and to beautify the earth.