12 TREES IN NATURE, MYTH & ART 



reminiscences we get. ('Cut this out,' as the 

 quack mediciners say, and keep by you.) Go 

 and sit in a grove or woods, with one or more 

 of those voiceless companions, and read the 

 foregoing and think." 



It is safe to assume that all who will read 

 these pages have felt as these writers have felt, 

 when in the woodland, though they may not 

 have put their feeling into words. I am offer- 

 ing the reader nothing new, but only seeking 

 to intensify his appreciation of something old. 

 Perhaps our sense of fellowship with the trees 

 is in part instinctive. It may have remained 

 in the blood from the time that our ancestors 

 lived and worshipped in the groves, nay, wor- 

 shipped the trees themselves. Charles Kings- 

 ley could hardly bring himself to part with the 

 idea that the pillars and branching vaulting- 

 ribs of Gothic architecture were copied from 

 the forest-aisles. We shall return to this sub- 

 ject hereafter, when we come to study the 

 many ways in which trees have figured in 

 architecture. At the moment I will only 

 quote a passage from Kingsley's Grots and 

 Groves, in which, speaking of the forms of 

 trees when they grow socially, he says : " I 



