For the pitch-pine's noblest qualities are, after all, not artistic, but moral. Such unalterable contentment, such hardiness and persistency, are enough to put the stoutest of us to shame. Once give it root, and no sterility of soil can discourage it. Everything else may succumb, but it--it and the gray birch--will make shift to live. Like the resin that exudes from it, having once taken hold, it has no thought of letting go. It is never "planted by the rivers of water," but all the same its leaf does not wither. No summer so hot and dry, no winter so cold and wet, but it keeps its perennial green. What cannot be done in one year may, perchance, be accomplished in three or four. It spends several seasons in ripening its fruit. Think of an apple-tree thus patient!
The pitch-pine is beautiful to look at, and "profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness," but it would be a shame not to add that it is also most excellent to smell of. If I am to judge, scarcely any odor wears better than this of growing turpentine. There is something unmistakably clean and wholesome about it. The very first whiff savors of salubrity. "The belief in the good effects of pine forests in cases of phthisis is quite unanimous" (so I read the other day in a scientific journal), "and the clinical evidence in favor of their beneficial influence is unquestioned." Who can tell whether our New England climate, with all its consumptive provocations, might not be found absolutely unendurable but for the amelioration furnished by this generously diffused terebinthine prophylactic?
When all is said, however, nothing else about the pitch-pine ever affects me so deeply as its behavior after man has done his worst upon it. It would appear to have some vague sense of immortality, some gropings after a resurrection. The tree was felled in the autumn, and the trunk cut up ignominiously into cord-wood; but in the spring the prostrate logs begin to put forth scattered tufts of bright green leaves,--life still working under the ribs of death,--while the stump, whether "through the scent of water" I cannot say, is perhaps sending up fresh shoots,--a piece of _post-mortem_ hopefulness the like of which no white pine, for all its seemingly greater vitality, was ever known to exhibit. But leaves and shoots alike come to nothing. If a pitch-pine die, it shall not live again. The wood's blind impulses, if not false in themselves, were at least falsely interpreted. Alas! alas! who has not found it so? What seemed like the prophetic stirrings of a new life were only the last flickerings of a lamp that was going out.