56 THE BEECH. 



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 harmonies of splendour, its 

 " long-drawn aisles and fretted vaults," its dimness 

 and arcaded scenery, its calm, and repose, and cool- 

 ness, 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," 



a grand old cathedral, we say, with these and its 

 thousand other solacing and inspiring charms, is 

 always the counterpart, among men's works, of the 

 ancient forest, where, in some mode or another, 

 every one of its imposing qualities is reverberated ; 

 it is pleasing, accordingly, to find that here and 

 there, amid the trees of the wood, the exact forms 

 and ideas worked out by the builder seem antici- 

 pated. In this one, the beech, we have not merely 



