(1)	Prospero.	She did confine thee,
		*****
		Into a cloven Pine;
		*****
		It was mine art, When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape The Pine and let thee out.
Tempest, act i, sc. 2 (273).
(2)	Suffolk.	Thus droops this lofty Pine and hangs his sprays.
2nd Henry VI, act ii, sc. 3 (45).
(3)	Prospero.	And by the spurs plucked up The Pine and Cedar.
Tempest, act v, sc. 1 (47).
(4)	Agamemnon.	As knots, by the conflux of meeting sap, Infect the sound Pine and divert his grain Tortive and errant from his course of growth.
Troilus and Cressida, act i, sc. 3 (7).
(5)	Antony.	Where yonder Pine does stand I shall discover all.
		*****
		This Pine is bark'd That overtopped them all.
Antony and Cleopatra, act iv, sc. 12 (23).
(6)	Belarius.	As the rudest wind That by the top doth take the mountain Pine, And make him stoop to the vale.
Cymbeline, act iv, sc. 2 (174).
(7)	1st Lord.	Behind the tuft of Pines I met them.
Winter's Tale, act ii, sc. 1 (33).
(8)	Richard.	But when from under this terrestrial ball He fires the proud top of the eastern Pines.
Richard II, act iii, sc. 2 (41).
(9)	Antonio.	You may as well forbid the mountain Pines To wag their high tops and to make no noise, When they are fretten with the gusts of heaven.
Merchant of Venice, act iv, sc. 1 (75).
(10)		Ay me! the bark peel'd from the lofty Pine, His leaves will wither, and his sap decay; So must my soul, her bark being peel'd away.
Lucrece (1167).

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—

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—

Complaint of Ænone.

Sir Walter Scott similarly describes the tree in the pretty and well-known lines—

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—

Chester's Love's Martyr.

And Gerard describing the fruit of the Pine Tree, says: "This Apple is called in ... Low Dutch, Pyn Appel, and in English, Pine-apple, clog, and cones." We also find "Fyre-tree," which is a true English word meaning the "fire-tree;" but I believe that "Fir" was originally confined to the timber, from its large use for torches, and was not till later years applied to the living tree.

The sweetness of the Pine seeds, joined to the difficulty of extracting them, and the length of time necessary for their ripening, did not escape the notice of the emblem-writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With them it was the favourite emblem of the happy results of persevering labour. Camerarius, a contemporary of Shakespeare and a great botanist, gives a pretty plate of a man holding a Fir-cone, with this moral: "Sic ad virtutem et honestatem et laudabiles actiones non nisi per labores ac varias difficultates perveniri potest, at postea sequuntur suavissimi fructus." He acknowledges his obligation for this moral to the proverb of Plautus: "Qui e nuce nucleum esse vult, frangat nucem" ("Symbolorum," &c., 1590).

In Shakespeare's time a few of the European Conifers were grown in England, including the Larch, but only as curiosities. The very large number of species which now ornament our gardens and Pineta from America and Japan were quite unknown. The many uses of the Pine—for its timber, production of pitch, tar, resin, and turpentine—were well known and valued. Shakespeare mentions both pitch and tar.

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