29 



THE BEECH. 



THE Beech is one of the grandest of our forest-trees. It rises to the 

 height of eighty or a hundred feet, and in dimensions, when full grown, 

 surpasses all except the oak. No tree forms woods so dry and pleasant 

 to walk'in, though grasses do not flourish beneath the shade ; and at 

 every season of the year it presents some remarkable and pleasing 

 peculiarity. In the depth of winter it is told by the smooth grey bark 

 and the arrangement of the branches ; in spring by the buds ; in summer 

 by the leaves ; while in autumn, if close by, we have the very curious 

 seed-pods, and at a distance, those auburn and coppery- golden dyes 

 which place the beech in the front rank of painted-foliage trees. 



The general character of the trunk and branches gives the idea, more 

 than is done by any other tree, of that glorious style of architecture 

 termed the Gothic. The columned temples of ancient Greece, and the 

 still older ones of ancient Egypt, lead the imagination away to palm- 

 trees, and in all probability are mementos of the use of those trees by 

 the earliest designers of high-class buildings ; in the beech, on the 

 other hand, though there is no reason to suppose that there is any 

 actual artistic and historical connection between the two things, we are 

 powerfully reminded of the clustered pillars of a Gothic cathedral,' and 

 especially of such as are formed of many independent and slender 

 shafts, as in Westminster Abbey, and ordinarily in the style called 

 " Early English." A grand old cathedral, with its innumerable har- 

 monies of splendour, its "long-drawn aisles and fretted vaults," its 

 dimness and arcaded scenery, its calm, and repose, and coolness, its 

 broken sunbeams, and imitative leaf and climbing plant on every 

 vantage, and not these only, but with its quiet and sculptured tombs, 

 with mitred abbot and belted warrior, sleeping so softly, 



While the sound of those they fought for, 

 And the steps of those they wrought for, 

 Echo round their bones for evermore, 



