subdued by their solemn gloom, the imaginative Greek well consecrated each grove and wood to some Divinity. The early Christians fled to "the armour of the house of the Forest," to escape to peace and quietness. Here the old Gothic builders first learnt how to rear their vaulted arches, and to wreathe their pillars with stone arabesques of leaves and flowers, in faint imitation of a beauty they might feel, but never reach.[1]
Consider, too, the loveliness of all tree-forms, from the birch and weeping-willow, which never know the slightest formality, even when in winter barest of leaves, to the oak with its sinewy boughs, strained and tortured as they are in this very Forest, as nowhere else in England, by the Channel winds.[2] Consider,
- ↑ It is worth noticing how, according to their natures, our English poets have dwelt upon the meaning of the woods, from Spenser, with his allegories, to the ballad-singer, who saw them only as a preserve for deer. Shakspeare touches upon them with both that joyful gladness, peculiar to him, and the deep melancholiness, which they also inspire. Shelley and Keats, though in very different ways, both revel in the woods. To Wordsworth they are—
Or map of the whole world: thoughts, link by link,
"like a dream
Enter through ears and eyesight, with such gleam
Of all things that at last in fear I shrink."Of course, under the names of woods, and any lessons from them, I speak only of such lowland woods as are known chiefly in England; not dense forests shutting out light and air, without flowers or song of birds, whose effect on national poetry and character is quite the reverse to that of the groves and woodlands of our own England. See what Mr. Ruskin has so well said on the subject. Modern Painters, vol. v., part vi, ch. ix., § 15, pp. 89, 90; and, also in the same volume, part vii., chap, iv., § 2, 3, pp. 137-39; and compare vol. iii., part iv., ch. xiv., § 33, pp. 217-19.
- ↑ In the lower part of the Forest, near the Channel, the effect is quite painful, all the trees being strained away from the sea like Tennyson's thorn. It is the usnea barbata which covers them, especially the oaks, with its hoary fringe, and gives such a character to the whole Forest.
