The Loveliness of Tree-forms. 



I say, for in the early spring, before the grass is yet green in the 

 meadows, here they all flock — white wood-anemones, sweet 

 primroses, sweeter violets, and hyacinths encircling each stem 

 with their blue wreaths. The home of the birds ; for when the 

 leaves at last have come, each tree is filled with song, and the 

 underwood with the first faint chirping of the nestlings learning 

 their earliest notes. As a temple for man, have they not been 

 so since the world began ? Taught by their tender beauty, and 

 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.* 



Consider, too, the loveliness of all tree-forms, from the birch 

 and weepiug-vidllow, which never know the slightest formality, 

 even when in winter barest of leaves, to the oak with its sineTrty 



* It is worth noticing how, according to their natures, our English 

 poets have dwelt upon the meaning of the Avoods, from Spenser, Avith 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 Words- 

 worth they are "a map of the whole world." 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 li^ht 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., eh. 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. 



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