152 BRAMBLES AND BAT LEAVES. 



and feel your eyes aching with the strange intersections of the stems 

 crossing each other, and thinned here and there by time or accident, 

 and observe the cones and broken twigs which sprinkle the green 

 sward, you think of Wordsworth's " sheddings of the pining um- 

 brage," and of those firs which live in their green beauty for ever in 

 his graphic verse, and perhaps you detect yourself involuntarily quot- 

 ing the lines : — 



-"Above my head, 



At every impulse of the moving breeze, 



The fir-grove murmurs with a sea-like sound." 



Bundles of poetical associations come tumbling upon you, — Thomas 

 Hood and the Midsummer Fairies, mingling with the weird tone of 

 the " Bridge of Sighs"; Spenser and his Catalogue of Trees, wherein 

 he individualises each by a happy choice of epithets : — 



" And forth they pass, with pleasure forward led, 



Joying to hear the birds' sweet harmony, 



Which, therein shrouded from the tempest's dread, 



Seemed in their song to scorn the cruel sky; 



Much can they praise the trees so straight and high, — 



The sailing pine, the cedar proud and tall." 



And as you get into a day-dream, and gaze upon the blue snatches 

 of sky through artless breaks in the foliage, and upon the " half- 

 excluded light which sleeps in patches upon the shadowy verdure 

 below," your thoughts turn to Robin Hood and John Keats ; to Scott 

 and his " forest fair ;" to Coleridge and the " leafy month of June ;" 

 to Robert Bloomfield and quaint old Herrick. And from the solemn 

 quietude and beauty of these pictures, the fancy draws innumerable 

 beautiful figures, such as the poets have ever delighted to revel in, 

 and they come up successively upon " that inward eye which is the 

 bliss of solitude," like stars peeping through the cool twilight, or 

 young hopes, hallowed in their birth by those boyish tears, not un- 

 frequently shed over fancied disappointments. And then bitter 

 memorials of old sins, and feelings of remorse for broken ties and rash 

 follies, overwhelm the soul like a November fog, and we feel that if 

 we had the power, we could gladly blot out all the history of our past. 

 But there are those who love us now, and the world is not all desolate, 

 and if the heart is in unison with the external world of beauty, we 

 shall find that the influences of nature have a balm for the recesses of 

 the deepest sorrow, and that a spirit of gloom and discontent is an 



