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. Sitting islanded on some gray peak above the encompassing
wood, the soul is lifted up to sing the Iliad of the pines. They
have no voice but the wind, and no sound of them rises up to the
high places. But the waters, the evidences of their power, that go
down the steep and stony ways, the outlets of ice-bordered pools,
the young rivers swaying with the force of their running, they sing
and shout and trumpet at the falls, and the noise of it far
outreaches the forest spires. You see from these conning towers
how they call and find each other in the slender gorges; how they
fumble in the meadows, needing the sheer nearing walls to give them
countenance and show the way; and how the pine woods are made glad
by them.

Nothing else in the streets of the mountains gives such a
sense of pageantry as the conifers; other trees, if they are any,
are home dwellers, like the tender fluttered, sisterhood of quaking
asp. They grow in clumps by spring borders, and all their stems