Broke only by the melancholy sound

Of drowsy bells for ever tinkling round;

Faint wail of eagle melting into blue

Beneath the cliffs, and pine-woods' steady sugh*:

Barry Cornwall makes frequent allusions to this poetical language of the woods:

"And when the tempest of November blew
The winter trumpet, till its failing breath
Went moaning into silence, every green
And loose leaf of the piny boughs did tell
Some trembling story of that mountain dell."

As the rough winds of autumn make, when they

Pass o'er a forest, and bend down the pines,

The giant sighed."

Death of Acis.

There dark trees

Funereal, (cypress, yew, and shadowy pine,
And spicy cedar), clustered, and at night
Shook from their melancholy branches sounds
And sighs like death.”

And a little farther on-

66

and when the rising moon
Flames down the avenue of pines, and looks
Red and dilated through the evening mists,
And chequered as the heavy branches sway

* The reader will most probably remember that this word, sugh, so expressive of this whispering of leaves in the wind, is a Scotch word.

To and fro with the wind, I stay to listen,

And fancy to myself that a sad voice,

Praying, comes moaning through the leaves, as 'twere
For some misdeed."

Marcelia.

This music is celebrated by Moschus in a beautiful little piece translated by L. Hunt :

"But when the deeps are moved, and the waves come
Shuddering along, and tumbling into foam,

I turn to earth, which trusty seems, and staid,

And love to get into a greenwood shade ;

In which the pines, although the winds be strong,
Can turn the bluster to a sylvan song*.”

Mr. Hunt praises the voice of the Pine in an original also:

poem

"And then there fled by me a rush of air
That stirred up all the other foliage there,
Filling the solitude with panting tongues;
At which the pines woke up into their songs,
Shaking their choral locks; and on the place
There fell a shade as on an awe-struck face;
And overhead, like a portentous rim
Pulled over the wide world, to make all dim,
A grave gigantic cloud came hugely uplifting him."
Nymphst."

Ovid represents the Cyclops, who lived on the coast of Sicily as carrying a lofty Pine-tree by way of walkingstick; and tells us that Ceres bore a flaming pine, plucked from Mount Etna, in each hand, to assist her

* Hunt's Foliage-Evergreens, p. 78.

+ Ibid. p. 24.

during the night in the search of her daughter Proserpine.

Ovid speaks of the Pine by the name of Teda. Brydone observes, that Teda is still the name of a tree growing on Mount Etna, which produces a great quantity of resin, and was surely the most proper tree that Ceres could have chosen for her purpose*. From the use of the Pine for torchwood, Teda has also been used to signify a torch, and has extended to our own language:

"At which a bushy teade a groom did light,
And sacred lamp in secret chamber hide,
Where it should not be quenched day nor night
For fear of evil Fates, but burnen ever bright."

SPENSER.

Homer thus describes the part of the Sicilian coast

where the Cyclops dwelt:

"When to the nearest verge of land we drew,

Fast by the sea a lonely cave we view,

High, and with darkening laurels covered o'er;

Where sheep and goats lay slumbering round the shore.

Near this a fence of marble from the rock,

Brown with o'erarching pine, and spreading oak.
A giant shepherd here his flock maintains

Far from the rest, and solitary reigns,

In shelter thick of horrid shade reclined;

And gloomy mischiefs labour in his mind."

POPE'S Homer's Odyssey, Book ix.

Sir Philip Sidney gives an inviting description of a wood of Pines :

"They lighted downe in a faire thicke wood, which did entice them with the pleasantnesse of it to take their

* Brydone's Tour through Sicily and Malta, Letter XI.

p. 164.

rest there. It was all of Pine-trees, whose broad heads meeting together, yeelded a perfecte shade to the grounde where their bodies gave a spacious and pleasant room to walke in they were set in so perfect an order, that every way the eye being full, yet no ways stopped. And even in the middest of them, were many sweet springs, which did loose themselves upon the face of the earth. Here Musidorus drew out such provisions of fruits and other cates, as hee had brought for that daies repaste, and laide it downe upon the faire carpet of the greene grasse. But Pamela had much more pleasure to walkę under those trees, making in their barkes pretty knots, that tyed together the names of Musidorus and Pamela, sometimes intermixedly changing them to Pammidorus and Musimela, with twenty other flowers of her travelling fancies, which had bound themselves to a greater restraint than they coulde, without much paine, well endure; and to one tree, more beholding to her than the rest, she entrusted the treasure of her thoughts in these verses*"

As the verses of Sir Philip Sidney are generally the least poetical part of his writings, the reader will not perhaps be anxious to be entrusted with the treasure; let the pine therefore retain its charge. The brilliancy of water seen through the dark shafts of Pine-trees, is beautifully represented in these few lines:

"And midst the flowers, turfed round beneath a shade

Of circling pines, a babbling fountain played,

And 'twixt their shafts you saw the water bright,

Which through the darksome tops glimmered with showering

light."

LEIGH HUNT t.

*

Sidney's Arcadia.

+ Story of Rimini, Canto iii.

Sannazaro speaks of "Pini si grandi, e si spatiosi, che ogn 'un per se havrebbe quasi bastato ad ombrare un selva." Pines so large and spreading, that any one of them might almost have sufficed to shade a wood.

He says that the shadow of the Pine kills every plant that is under it: he alludes perhaps to some particular species; certainly grass will grow luxuriantly under Pines.

A modern writer expresses a similar notion.

Shepherdess. "Help me, drive my sheep
Under yon lentisk hedge, while you and I
Beneath these shady pines can take our seat.”

Shepherd. Here is no turf, and all is rough and deep,
With scattered cones that will not let us lie."

H. SMITH.