It was mine art, When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape The Pine and let thee out.
Thus droops this lofty Pine and hangs his sprays.
And by the spurs plucked up The Pine and Cedar.
As knots, by the conflux of meeting sap, Infect the sound Pine and divert his grain Tortive and errant from his course of growth.
_Troilus and Cressida_, act i, sc. 3 (7).
Where yonder Pine does stand I shall discover all.
This Pine is bark'd That overtopped them all.
_Antony and Cleopatra_, act iv, sc. 12 (23).
As the rudest wind That by the top doth take the mountain Pine, And make him stoop to the vale.
But when from under this terrestrial ball He fires the proud top of the eastern Pines.
You may as well forbid the mountain Pines To wag their high tops and to make no noise, When they are fretten with the gusts of heaven.
_Merchant of Venice_, act iv, sc. 1 (75).
Ay me! the bark peel'd from the lofty Pine, His leaves will wither, and his sap decay; So must my soul, her bark being peel'd away.
In No. 8 is one of those delicate touches which show Shakespeare's keen observation of nature, in the effect of the rising sun upon a group of Pine trees. Mr. Ruskin says that with the one exception of Wordsworth no other English poet has noticed this. Wordsworth's lines occur in one of his minor poems on leaving Italy--
"My thoughts become bright like yon edging of Pines On the steep's lofty verge--how it blackened the air! But touched from behind by the sun, it now shines With threads that seem part of its own silver hair."
While Mr. Ruskin's account of it is this: "When the sun rises behind a ridge of Pines, and those Pines are seen from a distance of a mile or two against his light, the whole form of the tree, trunk, branches and all, becomes one frost-work of intensely brilliant silver, which is relieved against the clear sky like a burning fringe, for some distance on either side of the sun."--_Stones of Venice_, i. 240.
The Pine is the established emblem of everything that is "high and lifted up," but always with a suggestion of dreariness and solitude. So it is used by Shakespeare and by Milton, who always associated the Pine with mountains; and so it has always been used by the poets, even down to our own day. Thus Tennyson--