398 A GLANCE AT THE WOODLAND. 



to awaken in us the idea of wild nature. With the woods of Great 

 Britain, France, or Spain we are all familiar: 



" The beam 



Of noon is broken there by chestnut boughs 

 Down the steep verdant sides ; the air 

 So freshened by the leaping stream, which throws 

 Eternal showers of spray on the mossed roots 

 Of trees, and veins of turf, and long dark shoots 

 Of ivy-plants, and fragrant hanging bells 

 Of hyacinths, and on late anemones 

 That muffle its wet banks." * 



Our poets have sung of the murmurous groves of pines, and the deep 

 dark beech-woods that clothe with shadows the rounded forms of the 

 chalk-hills, and the long alleys of blossoming chestnut, fragrant lime, 

 or sombre yew. Therefore, without losing valuable time in these 

 familiar shades, without pausing before the oak which the history of 

 a thousand years has made immortal, let us rapidly traverse the 

 Corsican forests, where among the twisted leaves of the elms nourishes 

 the gigantic Larician pine ; those of Greece, where thrive the pines 

 of Cephaloaia and Apollo, and the oaks sacred also to the divinity of 

 Delphi and Dodona those oaks, dumb to-day, which formerly gave 

 utterance to oracles not less reverend than those of the Pythoness. 

 We will not even suffer ourselves to be delayed among the forests of 

 Eastern Europe, of Asia Minor, and of Persia, where dominate such 

 species as the pine, the beech, and the chestnut. It is not until we 

 have crossed the Indus that mighty river on whose banks halted 

 the legions of Alexander that the exuberant vegetation of the 

 Tropical world breaks upon us in all its glorious verdure and pro- 

 digious richness, though confined to a comparatively limited area. 



The wooded region of the western Ghauts, from Goa to Cape 

 Camorin, exhibits the greatest abundance of plants peculiar to 

 Southern Asia. 



To form an idea of the variety and potency of the Flora of this 

 region, says M. Lanoye,*f- we must contemplate the specimens immured 



* Matthew Arnold, New Poems : " Empedocles on Etna," p. 16. 

 t F. de Lanoye, " L'Inde Contemporaine," c. l er - 



