“The only pines I have seen in the United States are those in front of Emerson’s house in Concord; but compared with my native trees, they are scrubby and mean. These pine parasols under which I lay me, forgiving and forgetting, are fit for the gods. And although closely planted, they grow and flourish without much ado. I have seen spots not exceeding a few hundred square feet holding over thirty trees, and withal stout and lusty and towering. Indeed, the floor of the Tent seems too narrow at times for its crowded guests; but beneath the surface there is room for every root, and over it, the sky is broad enough for all.
“Ah, the bewildering vistas through the variegated pillars, taking in a strip of sea here, a mountain peak there, have an air of enchantment from which no human formula can release a pilgrim-soul. They remind me—no; they can not remind me of anything more imposing. But when I was visiting the great Mosques of Cairo I was reminded of them. Yes, the pine forests are the great mosques of Nature. And for art-lovers, what perennial beauty of an antique art is here. These majestic pillars arched with foliage, propping a light-green ceiling, from which cones hang in pairs and in clusters, and through which curiously shaped clouds can be seen moving in a cerulean sky; and at night, instead of the clouds, the stars—the distant, twinkling, white and blue stars—what to these are the decorations in the ancient mosques? There, the baroques, the arabesques, the colourings gorgeous, are dead, at least inanimate; here, they palpitate with life. The moving, swelling, flaming, flowing life is mystically interwoven in the evergreen ceiling and the stately colonnades. Ay, even the horizon yonder, with its planets and constellations rising and setting ever, is a part of the ceiling decoration.
“Here in this grand Mosque of Nature, I read my own Koran. I, Khalid, a Bedouin in the desert of life, a vagabond on the highway of thought, I come to this glorious Mosque, the only place of worship open to me, to heal my broken soul in the perfumed atmosphere of its celestial vistas. The mihrabs here are not in this direction nor in that. But whereso one