272 THE FOREST LANDS OF FINLAND. 
journey in a light sledge, with tinkling bells, through some 
such scented, dark-green and snow-white forest, while the 
stars and the Northern streamers glimmer overhead, has 
for the spirit what is in the highest degree refreshing. 
‘The Northern people have a deep feeling of this, and 
understand it well, and even the Laplander looks from 
under a mild heaven to the snow and the rocks, and sighs 
after the peaceful enjoyment of his waste-lying steppes. 
The Southerner, on the other hand, who for the first time 
visits the great coniferous forests of the interior of Finland, 
feels himself saddened under their stern aspect. It is not 
the absence of thesoft green in the beautiful display of colour 
with which the forests in the south adorn themselves, and 
which the broad-leaved woods of Finland are only ina 
position weakly to sigh after,—it is not the deep shadows 
and the moist coolness which awakens this feeling in him 
against his will; but it is the perfect stillness which gives 
them the stern aspect that does it; but this awe-pro- 
ducing silence of the wilderness does not the less fascinate 
and surprise him. 
‘Nine months long lasts this solemn stern silence of 
Nature. Itis as if the wild beasts were afraid to dese- 
crate the stillness by their noise: only rarely, as if 
restrained, sounds the howl of the hungry wolf, or the cry 
of some solitary bird of prey, while here and there only a 
heathcock flies out from the wood, and a sneaky fox steals 
about between the wood pile and the charcoal burner’s 
hut. 
‘But during the three months which follow this time of 
stillness, and in which the life of the north awakes from 
its winter sleep, from the the middie of April to the 
middle of July—the glorious time of light in which 
Nature knows no more of night—the solitude of the 
forest awakes to life, the song of birds is silenced neither 
by day nor by night, and if there be no hare frightened 
by the cry of the dogs hastening on fleet-foot through 
forest and field, there is no wood or bush so small or so 
destroyed but the hare is racing through it, and no forest 
