Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/78

64 angle as at first. It is fifteen minutes yet to its fall. Still its branches wave in the wind as if it were destined to stand for a century, and the wind soughs through its needles as of yore; it is still a forest tree, the most majestic tree that waves over Musketaquid. The silvery sheen of the sunlight is reflected from its needles, it still affords an inaccessible crotch for the squirrel's nest, not a lichen has forsaken its mast-like stem, its raking mast; the hill is the hulk. Now, now is the moment, the manikins at its base are fleeing from their crime. They have dropped the guilty saw and axe. How slowly and majestically it starts, as if it were only swayed by a summer breeze, and would return without a sigh to its location in the air, and now it fans the hillside with its fall, and lies down to its bed in the valley from which it is never to rise, as softly as a feather, folding its green mantle about it like a warrior, as if, tired of standing, it embraced the earth with silent joy, returning its elements to the dust again. But, hark! you only saw, you did not hear. There now comes up a deafening crash to these rocks, advertising you that even trees do not die without a groan. I went down and measured it. It was four feet in diameter where it was sawed, and about a hundred feet long. Before I had reached it, the axemen had