The Forest Sunsets. 



Across its broad expanse of moors the sun still sets the 

 same in summer time into some deep bank of clouds in 

 the west, and as it plunges down, flashes of light run along 

 their edges, and each thin band of vapour becomes a bar of 

 fire, and the far-away Purbeck hills gleam with purple and 

 amethyst. 



The same sea, too, still heaves and tosses beneath the 

 Hordle and Barton Cliffs, with the same purple patches, 

 shadows of clouds, sailing over it, as its waves, along the 

 shore, unroll their long scrolls of foam. 



These great natural facts have not changed. Kelt and 

 Koman have gone, but these are the same. 



Nor must I forget the extraordinary lovely atmospheric 

 effects, noticed also by Gilpin,* as seen, under certain conditions, 

 from the Barton Cliffs on the Isle of Wight and the Needles. 

 Far out at sea will rise a low white fog-bank gradually stealing 

 to the land, enveloping some stray ship in its folds, and then 



* Remarks on Forest Scenery, illustrated by the New Parent, vol. ii., 

 pp. 24] -46 ; third edition. Some mention should here be made of Gilpin, 

 a man who, in a barren, unnatiiral age, partook of much of the same spirit 

 as Cowper and Thompson, and whose work should be placed side by side 

 vri'h their poems. Unfortunately, much of his description is now quite 

 useless, as the Forest has been so much altered ; but the real value of the 

 book still remains unchanged in its pure love for Nature and its simple, 

 unaffected tone. It is well Avorth, however, noticing as showing the 

 enormous difficulty of overcoming an established error that, notwithstand- 

 ing his true appreciation of bough-forms (see vol. i., pp. 110-12, same 

 edition), and his hatred of pollarded shapes, and all formalism (same vol., 

 p. 4), he had not sufficient force to bresik through the conventional drawing 

 of the eighteenth ai.l the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, and his 

 trees (see, as before, pp. 252-54) are all drawn under the impression that 

 they are a gigantic species of cabbage. The edition, however, published in 

 1834, and edited by Sir T. D. Lauder, is in this and many other respects, 

 far better. 



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