THE WOODS. 183 



let in the light for the seedlings to grow. Philip Gil- 

 bert Hamerton, who also loved a forest, speaks thus of 

 him, in "The Sylvan Year:" 



"Think what was Spenser's conception of a forest, and 

 what in our time is too often the uninteresting reality! He 

 thought of it as a country shaded by a great roof of green 

 foliage, which was carried on massive stems always so far 

 apart that one or several knights could ride everywhere with- 

 out inconvenience; but we find the reality to be for the most 

 part an impenetrable jungle of young trees, that will be cut 

 down in a year or two for firewood." 



Milton's imaginative Eden, too, is a very delight- 

 ful forest picture : 



" So on he fares, and to the border comes 

 Of Eden, where delicious Paradise, 

 Now nearer, crowns with her inclosure green, 

 As with a rural mound, the champaign head 

 Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides 

 With thicket overgrown, grotesque, and wild, 

 Access denied ; and overhead up grew 

 Insuperable heights of loftiest shade, 

 Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm." 



But do you know William Gilpin's "Forest Scen- 

 ery?" 'T is a rare old book, and one for the forest. 

 I well recollect the time I first read it. It was in a 

 woods which bespoke great age, beneath the gnarled, 

 wide-spreading beech that I spoke of, upon the trunk 

 of which had been carved the initials, and the dates 

 inscribed, one 1864, and another 1869, very rough and 

 irregular now, almost like the seams and cracks of the 

 old tree itself, yet still discernible from those days of 

 long ago. I could scarcely have found a more fitting 



