Learn about a pine tree from a pine tree, and about a bamboo stalk from a bamboo stalk.

-Basho, Matsuo
Attributed, quoted in On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho (translated by Lucien Stryk), introduction.

I, Dekanahwideh, and the Confederated Chiefs, now uproot the tallest pine tree, and into the cavity thereby made we cast all weapons of war† Thus shall the Great Peace be established.

-Dekanahwideh   fl.c.1450
Traditional words from the Six Nations Confederacy (present- day Ontario and the Northeastern United States), one of the world's oldest constitutions, quoted in Paul  A  W  Wallace The White Roots of Peace (1946).

And on that grave where English oak and holly And laurel wreaths entwine, Deem it not all a too presumptuous folly, This spray of Western pine!

-Harte, (Francis) Bret
  On the death of Charles Dickens.'Dickens in Camp', stanza10.

By the shore of Gitche Gumee By the shining Big-Sea-Water, Stood the wigwam of Nokomis, Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis. Dark behind it rose the forest, Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees, 516 Rose the firs with cones upon them; Bright before it beat the water, Beat the clear and sunny water, Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.

-Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
  The Song of Hiawatha, pt.3,'Hiawatha's Childhood'.

   Who sees pale Mammon pine amidst his store, Sees but a backward steward for the poor; This year a reservoir, to keep and spare, The next a fountain, spouting through his heir, In lavish streams to quench a country's thirst, And men and dogs shall drink him 'till they burst.

-Pope, Alexander
  Epistles to Several Persons,'To Lord Bathurst', l.173^8.

   Hail to the Chief who in honour advances! Honoured and bless'd be the evergreen Pine!

-Scott, Sir Walter
  The Lady of the Lake, canto 2, stanza19,'Boat Song'.

We look before and after, And pine for what is not: Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught: Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

-Shelley, Percy Bysshe
  'To a Skylark', stanza18.

The sailing pine, the cedar proud and tall, The vine-prop elm, the poplar never dry, The builder oak, sole king of forests all, The aspen good for staves, the cypress funeral. The laurel, meed of mighty conquerors And poets sage, the fir that weepeth still, The willow worn of forlorn paramours, The ewe obedient to the benders will, The birch for shafts, the sallow for the mill, The myrrh sweet bleeding in the bitter wound, The warlike beech, the ash for nothing ill, The fruitful olive, and the platan round, The carver holme, the maple seldom inward sound.

-Spenser, Edmund
  The Faerie Queen, bk.1, canto1, stanzas 8^9. plantan=plane tree; holme=holly.

No little lily-handed baronet he, A great broad-shouldered genial Englishman, A lord of fat prize-oxen and of sheep, A raiser of huge melons and of pine, A patron of some thirty charities, A pamphleteer on guano and on grain.

-Tennyson
  The Princess,'Conclusion', l.84^9.

She was cut off fromthe past and therefore did not live in the present. But suddenly, as she stood close against a pine tree and breathed in its sharp, bitter scent, a clear space opened to her childhood, as though a wind had sprung fromthesea, clearing a mist.It wasnot a memory from the past, it was the past itself, as alive, as real; and she knew that she and the child of forty years ago were the same person.

-Thomas, D(onald) M(itchell)
TheWhite Hotel, ch.4.