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Show SEQUOIA FOREST A PEAN OF ANTIQUITY Has Seen Civilizations Rise and Crash. It was, possibly, only yesterday by geologic time when the Sequoia forest began its definite existence 300,000,000 years, at a guess. Two hundred million years ago It was well established and had fixed habits hab-its much as at present. Passing lightly over 190,000,000 years, 10,-000,000 10,-000,000 years ago the genus homo perhaps began to take refuge in its branches. In the days when Moses was a mountain climber, on a portion of the earth's crust very nearly the antipodes an-tipodes of the Sinai peninsula a region that was not to receive the name of California for some forty centuries a forest of sequoias stretched 'their green and glossy fingers fin-gers into the shimmering western sky. Alrept'ly for an unimagined pe-r.T.d. pe-r.T.d. through summer and winter, cold and heat, seed time and harvest, har-vest, day and night, it had pressed inch by inch into the firmament ; ring by ring it had imperceptibly added to Its girth. Xinevah and Babylon, Rome and Carthage, Tyre and Jerusalem rose and fell. Cyrus and Genghis Khan, Alexander, Julius Caesar and Napoleon Na-poleon conquered the world. Confucius Con-fucius and Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed Mo-hammed swayed the realm of the spirit. Solomon and Socrates, Galileo Gali-leo and Darwin, produced the bitter and potent fruit of the thinking mind. Homer and Vergil and Dante and Shakespeare gave to the world of the imagination a local habitation. Pericles and Aspasia, Paolo and Francesca, Launcelot and Guinevere, counted the world well lost for the brief ecstasy of love. The Sequoia forest, untroubled by the rise and fall of nations, unconscious uncon-scious of the sulphurous depths of passion and woe of the human spirit, spir-it, unchanged by the cataclysmic changes in the world of human thought, mercifully untouched even by terrestrial cataclysms that overwhelmed over-whelmed many a mountain and plain, scattered its golden polleu In the spring, Its ripened cones in the fall; sang its inimitable, dreamy song when the winds passed throng!) it. Almost within sound of its "hushing." "hush-ing." great civilizations came to maturity ma-turity and sank into the soil so deep that the youngest, even now, is inarticulate. Alice Day Pratt In the Atlantic Monthly. |
