18 FORESTRY OF NORWAY. 



' Crossing the cultivated grounds we immediately entered 

 a forest, the features of which were of an entirely different 

 character fiom those we had passed in the earlier part of 

 the day. The surface was nearly level for the whole space 

 we traversed that evening and the early stage of the 

 morrow a distance of eighteen or twenty miles. It lay 

 along the left bank of the Nid, which on its other shore 

 washed the base of that long range of perpendicular cliffs 

 which we had marked from our last station. There was 

 no undergrowth, except where we occasionally crossed 

 water-courses, which discharged themselves into the river. 

 The banks of these were profusely hung with alder and 

 birch. The boles of the tall pines were also clear of 

 boughs to the height of fifty or sixty feet. Upwards, 

 their tapering stems and spreading branches were of a 

 bright resinous hue, to which the rays of the setting sun 

 gave additional lustre, in singular contrast with the hoary 

 cast of the scaly trunks below, to which the shades of 

 evening already imparted a deeper tint. The trees 

 appeared as regularly set out as if they had been artifi- 

 cially planted and thinned one looked in vain for those 

 giants of the forest which had before attracted our notice. 

 No prostrate masses, moulding in gradual decay, told the 

 tale which had before led us to moralise on the processes 

 of nature and the revolutions of time. The rocky steeps, 

 the rough and tangled brake, all which before had given 

 that air of savage wild ness to the forest, were here want- 

 ing. But still the sandy plains which we were now tra- 

 versing had a character of magnificence peculiarly their 

 own. The wider extent of the same unbroken line cano- 

 pied above by that dark mass of spreading foliage ; those 

 countless columns, which, far as the eye could reach in 

 every direction, mile after mile, stood tall, erect, dignified 

 supporting that living roof; these long drawn vistas, 

 through the receding arches of which one sought in vain 

 to penetrate the depths of that vast solitude ; the deepen- 

 ing gloom still chequered by the rays which the setting 

 sun shot athwart the trees ; the silence unbroken save by 



