296 THE DAEK PLAINS. 



Middle Ages. The solemn services of the Eoman Cath- 

 olic religion found a people whose imagination haying 

 been stimulated by their druidical rites looked upon these 

 wonderful temples as transcending nature in grandeur ; 

 and they bowed before the Cross with still greater devo- 

 tion than they had felt when they made sacrifices under 

 the oak. 



There is an indefinable charm in a deep wood, even 

 before we have learned enough to people it with nymphs 

 and dryads and other mythical beings. Groups of trees 

 that invite us to their shade and shelter, in our childhood, 

 on a sultry summer noon, yield us a foretaste of their 

 sensible comfort ; and a fragment of wild wood, if we see 

 nothiag more spacious, with its cawing crows, its scream- 

 ing jays, and its few wild quadrupeds, gives us some 

 conception of the immensity of a pathless forest that 

 never yet resounded with the woodman's axe. I was 

 already familiar with these vestiges of nature's greatness, 

 enough to inspire ma with feelings that do not become 

 very definite until the mind is matured. 



The time had come at last when I was to visit one of 

 these solemn temples of the gods. I was between- eight 

 and nine years of age, and was to accompany my parents 

 on a journey from Beverly to Concord, my mother's native 

 town, in ISTew Hampshire. I give tliis narrative of per- 

 sonal experience, to prove that our love of nature is an 

 innate feeling, which is exalted, but not created, by the 

 imagination. Nothing ever occupied my mind so in- 

 tensely as the thought of visiting these Dark Plains. 

 Other objects seen on our journey were amusing and at- 

 tractive ; but this wood was the only one that excited 

 in me a passionate interest. All my thoughts were obscure 

 and indefinite, associated with some dreary conceptions of 

 beauty and grandeur; for in our early years we aspire 

 after more exalted feelings than the common scenes of 

 Nature can awaken. 



