The woods were God's first temples

“The woods were God's first temples” is Anne Shirley's concise expression of how the natural world can inspire reverence. During a March evening ramble with Phil Gordon, she links the pines around them to a sacred space, answering the scene's quiet beauty with a spiritual interpretation.

Form and Meaning

Anne gives the woods the status of humanity's earliest temples. The metaphor does not describe a built place of worship; it makes the forest itself a setting for reverence. She explains that walking among the pines makes her feel near God, so the phrase joins the physical act of being in the woods to an inward experience of devotion.

The March Evening Scene

The expression arises from a landscape rendered through both silence and sound. The evening is still and mild, under a great white silence threaded with small silvery sounds. Anne and Phil wander along a pineland aisle toward a deep-red winter sunset, while the rosy light stains the green tips of the pines. The scene gives the phrase its immediate setting: the woods are not merely named as sacred but experienced through attentive listening, color, and movement.

Phil responds to the same surroundings as a would-be poet. She says she would write a poem that moment if she knew how, and describes the dark trees as seeming to think. Anne's quotation answers Phil's imaginative attention with a language of worship. Together, their remarks frame the forest as both a source of poetic wonder and a place where nature prompts spiritual feeling.