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—
"They came, they cut away my tallest Pines—
My dark tall Pines, that plumed the craggy ledge—
High o'er the blue gorge, and all between
The snowy peak and snow-white cataract
Fostered the callow eaglet; from beneath
Whose thick mysterious boughs in the dark morn
The panther's roar came muffled while I sat
Down in the valley."
Complaint of Ænone.
Sir Walter Scott similarly describes the tree in the pretty and well-known lines—
"Aloft the Ash and warrior Oak
Cast anchor in the rifted rock;
And higher yet the Pine tree hung
His shattered trunk, and frequent flung,
Where seemed the cliffs to meet on high,
His boughs athwart the narrow sky."
Yet the Pine which was best known to Shakespeare, and perhaps the only Pine he knew, was the Pinus sylvestris, or Scotch fir, and this, though flourishing on the highest hills where nothing else will flourish, certainly attains its fullest beauty in sheltered lowland districts. There are probably much finer Scotch firs in Devonshire than can be found in Scotland. This is the only indigenous Fir, though the Pinus pinaster claims to be a native of Ireland, some cones having been supposed to be found in the bogs, but the claim is not generally allowed (there is no proof of the discovery of the cones); and yet it has become so completely naturalized on the coast of Dorsetshire, especially about Bournemouth, that it has been admitted into the last edition of Sowerby's "English Botany."
But though the Scotch Fir is a true native, and was probably much more abundant in England formerly than it is now, the tree has no genuine English name, and apparently never had. Pine comes directly and without change from the Latin, Pinus, as one of the chief products, pitch, comes directly from the Latin, pix. In the early vocabularies it is called "Pin-treow," and the cones are "Pin-nuttes." They were also called "Pine apples," and the tree was called the Pine-Apple Tree.[208:1] This name was transferred to the rich West Indian fruit[208:2] from its similarity to a fir-cone, and so was lost to the fruit of the fir-tree, which had to borrow a new name from the Greek; but it was still in use in Shakespeare's day—