in Thoreau’s Journal:

As we stand by the Mt on the Battleground––I see a white pine dimly in the horizon just north of Lee’s Hill––at 5 1/2 Pm, its upright stem & straight horizontal feathered branches––while at the same time I hear a robin sing.  Each enhances the other. That tree seems the emblem of my life––it stands for the west––the wild.

The sight of it is grateful to me as to a bird whose perch it is to be at the end of a weary flight. I am not sure whether the music I hear is most in the robins’ song or in its boughs. The pine tree that stands on the verge of the clearing––whose boughs point westward. Which the villager does not permit to grow on the common or by the road side.–– In whose boughs the crow and the hawk have their nests.