116 THE BOOK OF THE OPEN AIR 



cessively drilled and schooled to the shrub which is not bound up deeply 

 nurture of a single predominant species and indissolubly for the mind with 

 generally an exotic to the soil this the whole life and aspect of some land- 

 rich variety within narrow limits is scape or region where it is most at 

 no less remarkable and attractive home in the soil, and seems, in a 

 than the characteristic stamp which curious way, to bring most other 

 is given to most regions of England things into a kind of subordinate 

 by the prevalent luxuriance of a parti- agreement to its own determining 

 cular kind of tree. From the steep, expression of growth, 

 hanging beechwoods of the chalk or In ages past, probably for more than 

 limestone ranges, the eye traverses a thousand years, the native trees of 

 wide vales and plains massed with the Britain have been reinforced from time 

 crowns of high and heavy elms, or to time by the introduction of foreign 

 thickly beset with round and virile species, many of which, like the larch, 

 oaks ; in other quarters of England, the Spanish chestnut, and the black 

 the poplar whispers alone, high over and Lombardy poplars, have long 

 the wide, green cattle-marshes ; there been so completely assimilated with 

 are vales of the west where the deep our landscapes that they form as 

 old lichened orchards guard dew even natural and characteristic elements as 

 at noonday in their caverns of August the very oaks and hawthorns them- 

 shade ; and though the north has no selves. Yet to all whose eyes and 

 elms, except the rounder, more fern- thoughts dwell year after year on the 

 inine wych-elm, " the oak, and the varied tracts of copse, brake, and 

 ash, and the bonny ivy-tree " have woodland, with their sky-lit tracery 

 been taken, in the old ballad, as the in winter, and all the leafy gradations 

 very symbols of home for the North- of unfolding spring, there comes a 

 erner, who knows, too, how clean and keen sense of discrimination for their 

 deep is the sycamore shade, by the relative degrees of antiquity as features 

 grey doorways of his dale-end farms, of native English scenery ; the instinct 

 There are but few English districts comes naturally to read the history 

 in which some particular kind of tree of each landscape, to perceive what 

 or copsewood does not form one of tracts are still untouched oases of the 

 the strongest elements in the scenery ; ancient greenwood, and which bear 

 and there is no single tree or little the newest traces of admixture, and 



