Does a man bare his head in some old church?  So did I, standing in the shadow of this regal tree, and looking up into that completed glory, at which three hundred years have been at work with noiseless fingers!  What was I in its presence but a grasshopper? 

My heart said: “I may not call thee property, and that property mine!  Thou art the child of summer.  Though art the the mighty temple where birds praise God.  Thou belongest to no man’s hand, but to all men’s eyes that do love beauty, and that have learned through beauty to behold God! 

–Henry Ward Beecher, A Discourse On Trees, 1893