C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Trees
The groves were God’s first temples.
A brotherhood of venerable trees.
The mourner yew and builder oak were there.
This is the forest primeval.
Grove nods at grove.
He loves his old hereditary trees.
Slips of yew, silvered in the moon’s eclipse.
Spare, woodman, spare the beechen tree!
The dureful oak, whose sap is not yet dried.
Cause not a tree to die.
A tree in the desert is still a tree.
The highest and most lofty trees have the most reason to dread the thunder.
A large, branching, aged oak is perhaps the most venerable of all inanimate objects.
All the tree-tops lay asleep, like green waves on the sea.
A forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not disagreeable, in effect; a mass of one species of tree is sublime.
Hence it is that old men do plant young trees, the fruit whereof another age shall take.
Like some tall tree, the monster of the wood, o’ershading all that under him would grow.
A tree is a nobler object than a prince in his coronation robes.
No gale disturb the trees, nor aspen leaves confess the gentle breeze.
The trees were unctuous fir, and mountain ash.
The whispering breeze pants on the leaves, and dies upon the trees.
Old trees in their living state are the only things that money cannot command.
Whose roots earth’s centre touch, whose heads the skies.
Worn, gray olive-woods, which seem the fittest foliage for a dream.
Next to ye both I love the palm, with his leaves of beauty, his fruit of balm.
Poplars and alders ever quivering played, and nodding cypress formed a fragrant shade.
An oak whose boughs were mossed with age, and high top bald with dry antiquity.
What planter will attempt to yoke a sapling with a falling oak?
Trees the most lovingly shelter and shade us when, like the willow, the higher soar their summits the lowlier droop their boughs.
In heaven the trees of life ambrosial fruitage bear, and vines yield nectar.
The fir-trees dark and high; I used to think their slender tops were close against the sky.
That forbidden tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world, and all our woe.
The osier good for twigs, the poplar for the mill.
And winter, that grand old harper, smote his thunder-harp of pines.
With every change his features played, as aspens show the light and shade.
Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, dream, and so dream, all night without a stir.
I sit where the leaves of the maple and the gnarled and knotted gum are circling and drifting around me.
I wonder how it is that so cheerful-looking a tree as the willow should have become associated with ideas of sadness.
These blasted pines, wrecks of a single winter, barkless, branchless, a blighted trunk upon a cursed root.
When we plant a tree, we are doing what we can to make our planet a more wholesome and happier dwelling-place for those who come after us if not for ourselves.
Beautiful isles! beneath the sunset skies tall, silver-shafted palm-trees rise, between full orange-trees that shade the living colonade.
The trees by the way should have borne men, and expectation fainted, longing for what it had not.
In lands of palm and southern pine; in lands of palm, of orange-blossom, of olive, aloe, and maize, and wine.
In all great arts, as in trees, it is the height that charms us; we care nothing for the roots or trunks, yet it could not be without the aid of these.
The oak roars when a high wind wrestles with it; the beech shrieks; the elm sends forth a long, deep groan; the ash pours out moans of thrilling anguish.
The willow is a sad tree, whereof such who have lost their love make their mourning garlands, and we know what exiles hung up their harps upon such doleful supporters. The twigs are physic to drive out the folly of children.
The works of a person that builds begin immediately to decay, while those of him who plants begin directly to improve. In this, planting promises a more lasting pleasure than building; which, were it to remain in equal perfection, would at best begin to moulder and want repairs in imagination. Now trees have a circumstance that suits our taste, and that is annual variety.
Trees have about them something beautiful and attractive even to the fancy, since they cannot change their places, are witnesses of all the changes that take place around them; and as some reach a great age, they become, as it were, historical monuments, and like ourselves they have a life, growing and passing away,—not being inanimate and unvarying like the fields and rivers. One sees them passing through various stages, and at last step by step approaching death, which makes them look still more like ourselves.
The tremendous unity of the pine absorbs and moulds the life of a race. The pine shadows rest upon a nation. The northern peoples, century after century, lived under one or other of the two great powers of the pine and the sea, both infinite. They dwelt amidst the forests as they wandered on the waves, and saw no end nor any other horizon. Still the dark, green trees, or the dark, green waters jagged the dawn with their fringe or their foam. And whatever elements of imagination, or of warrior strength, or of domestic justice were brought down by the Norwegian or the Goth against the dissoluteness or degradation of the south of Europe were taught them under the green roofs and wild penetralia of the pine.