Pine Woods, The
Short-Leafed Balfour And Murryana Of The High Sierras, Are Sombre,
Rooted In The Litter Of A Thousand Years, Hushed, And Corrective To
The Spirit.
The trail passes insensibly into them from the black
pines and a thin belt of firs.
You look back as you rise, and
strain for glimpses of the tawny valley, blue glints of the Bitter
Lake, and tender cloud films on the farther ranges. For such
pictures the pine branches make a noble frame. Presently they
close in wholly; they draw mysteriously near, covering your tracks,
giving up the trail indifferently, or with a secret grudge. You
get a kind of impatience with their locked ranks, until you come
out lastly on some high, windy dome and see what they are about.
They troop thickly up the open ways, river banks, and brook
borders; up open swales of dribbling springs; swarm over old
moraines; circle the peaty swamps and part and meet about clean
still lakes; scale the stony gullies; tormented, bowed, persisting
to the door of the storm chambers, tall priests to pray for rain.
The spring winds lift clouds of pollen dust, finer than
frankincense, and trail it out over high altars, staining the snow.
No doubt they understand this work better than we; in fact
they know no other. "Come," say the churches of the valleys,
after a season of dry years, "let us pray for rain." They would do
better to plant more trees.
It is a pity we have let the gift of lyric improvisation die
out.
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