The Fallen Giant
Created | Updated Aug 20, 2017
Do you wax poetic about trees?
The Fallen Giant
Ed. Note: A Mr Andrew Park of California wrote the following in the California Independent of 13 February 1913. This lyrical description of a fallen sequoia was planted smack in the middle of an appreciation of the late Abraham Lincoln. People say the funniest things. We thought you might enjoy it.
The people of this nation – especially the Southland – could not understand him [Lincoln] – the magnitude of his character – until he had fallen. Then we said, with Israel of old, "Behold, a tree in Lebanon has fallen!" Ah, such is frail humanity. We cannot
measure a tree as it stands1. Only its prostrate form. I once visited the "Giant Forest" in the heart of the Sierras. I looked up – and up – three hundred feet high and saw their topmost boughs mingling their evergreen foliage with the blue dome of the skies. I stepped the circumference at the base of one of the Giants and the verified figures said; "One hundred feet2." I had come and I had seen with mine eyes3, but I could not comprehend. As I stood, silent, awe-enwrapped4, in the presence of these masterpieces of the Eternal God, my attention was directed to "The Fallen Giant," biggest and oldest of all, where a company of hilarious men5, mounted on horses, were riding upright along the hallway of its great interior, one hundred feet, and out at a doorway made by the severing of one of its arms. I stood with bared head, sombrero in hand6, as I reverently surveyed its prostrate form. For four thousand years it had withstood the storms of the Sierras, each driving its radicals deeper into the granitic mountain7. It was a forest tree one hundred feet high when Moses wrote, "In the beginning God created the Heavens and the earth." For many seasons the autumnal fires had eaten at its heart and carved the great sym[m]etrical hallway; to which we have referred. During its reign of forty centuries as "King of the Forest" the angry heavens had hurled a thousand bolts of lightning against its stalwart form8. In the strength of its young manhood9 the Sierras grated and groaned in mourning at the tragic death of their Maker10. Its adversity was its strength. Glacier and snow its constant companions. Its food the granite of the mountains. Its messengers the flashing lightnings, the pealing thunders, the trembling, grating, undulating, rumbling earthquake. But the climax of its greatness, the consum[m]ation of its majesty, was its fall.
Such was the life, the labors, the death of the immortal Lincoln.
Ed.Note: We're not sure what Lincoln would have made of this panegyric11. He might have chuckled. But think about it: when was the last time you heard anybody get that worked up about a tree? In this age of environmental crisis, maybe we need to recover some of that sense of awe.
We can do without the hilarious horsemen, though.
