THE OAK WOOD 



bare as the ash tree or the lime ; but there have 

 been hours during the last fortnight at which the 

 scene has been a wonderful enchantment. There 

 has been colour in the oak woods of which the eye 

 cannot get its full ; colour and shade and grouping 

 endless in variety, flung together anyhow, and yet 

 with careless perfection making masterpieces, by 

 contrast with which the greatest human art in 

 colour and arrangement is meagre and futile. 



Sown by accident among the oaks, the birches 

 have also been most beautiful this November. 

 Losing their lower leaves early in the month, they 

 kept the upper ones till the oaks had turned. They 

 appeared as peaks of pure yellow, bright almost as 

 the slanting sunbeams that fell across them in the 

 afternoon. The golden-haired larches alone equalled 

 the birches in brightness, the gold on their thread- 

 like, curled stems turning here and there to bronze. 

 These were the simpler touches in the pageant of 

 the oaks. A man can paint or recall, more or less, 

 what he has seen of these two delicate trees in 

 spring or late autumn when the atmosphere has 

 been clear. But the oaks are indescribable, un- 

 thinkable, the moment we lose sight of them. A 

 thousand hues and shades lie on a single tree. 

 Now it seems a glory of orange brown, now of 

 bronze that prevails ; or, with our back to the 

 setting sun, the oaks quite near by are carmine. 



One impression we can carry away from the 

 oak woods, clear and strong that the trees, what- 

 ever the light and the day, looked as if they were 



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