Tlie Loveliness of Tree-forms. 



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 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. f 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 Words- 

 worth they are 



" like a dream 



Or map of the whole world : thought?, link by link, 

 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. 



f 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. 



C 9 



