Pine Trees.

Gisborne Times, Volume VI, Issue 214, 16 September 1901, Page 1

Pine Trees.

(To the Editor of the Times.)

Sir, —In common with many I have loved the pine trees that grew around the Church of England building in our town ; during the twenty-three years I’ve been here my affection, veneration, and devotional feelings for them, intensified as the years passed as I saw those fine trees grow more picturesquely venerable. On Sunday morning I saw one lying prostrate ; with an angry impulse at my heart I almost turned away to seek religious solace in the fields, or woods, or by some hedgerow. But the sad fate of one of the noblemen of our day, overcame my poor grief by giving place to a greater—noble McKinley. Gon help his brokenhearted wife. The foundations of this world’s greatest Empire to be, is, indeed, being laid in the most precious blood of the great Republic, and watered by the Heaven-accepted tears of bereaved and patiently suffering women. But O ! my pine trees; no pang of painful regret blunted that murderous axe that laid my loved pine in the dust ; no memory of Eliza Cook’s song, “ Woodman, spare that tree ! ”-—no thought of “ Dear pine whose boughs are mossed with age,

And high top bald with dry antiquity

In, “ As you like it " : Shakespeare. None of the refined thoughts which bestrew Wordsworth’s hallowed muse, it seems, made even a rustle in the head of that axe, which so much resembled the head of the accomplished man that swung it—

9 This tree ! a living thing Produced too slowly ever to decay ; Of form and aspect too magnificent To be destroyed.” No lingering thought of what the sweet quaker poet Whittier sings of the cypress tree of Ceylon : which by strange coincidence, or, is it a relic of Gospel teaching '? — bears exact resemblance to the tree whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. None of the Masters of the Heavenly Lyre—that I am aware of —sings so well and so fully of the trees of garden, field, and forest' as my beloved master Whittier.

We read that Jehovah walked in the garden in the cool of the day ; he walks no longer under the pines of Trinity Church. May I suggest —that the ground which could*not afford standing room for a small grove of trees be at once let for a timberstacking yard, or a fish-curing concern. Utility means money and progrees, trees are but a nuisance and an eyesore. Your afflicted correspondent, but be hopes to survive.—l am, etc., G. H. Wilson.