Where roots of the beeches. The ilex will keep its 

 the Forest dusty green through the harvest winter: the 

 Murmurs. y ew> t ^ e CV p resSj the holly, have no need of 

 the continual invasion of the winds and rains 

 and snows. On the ash and elm the wood-ivy 

 will hang her spiked leaves. On many of the 

 oaks the lovely dull green of the mistletoe will 

 droop in graceful clusters, the cream -white 

 berries glistening like innumerable pleiads of 

 pearls. But these are lost in the immense 

 uniformity of desolation. They are accidents, 

 interludes. The wilderness knows them, as 

 the grey wastes of tempestuous seas know a 

 wave here and there that lifts a huge ram- 

 part of jade crowned with snow, or the long 

 resiliency of gigantic billows which reveal 

 smooth falling precipices of azure. The waste 

 itself is one vast desolation, the more grey and 

 terrible because in the mass invariable. 



To go through those winter -aisles of the 

 forest is to know an elation foreign to the 

 melancholy of November or to the first fall of 

 the leaf. It is not the elation of certain days 

 in February, when the storm- cock tosses his 

 song among the wild reefs of naked bough 

 and branch. It is not the elation of March, 

 when a blueness haunts the myriad unburst 

 buds, and the throstle builds her nest and calls 

 to the South. It is not the elation of April, 



10 



