16 FORESTRY OF NORWAY. 
‘we had to cross a tract of country of the wildest character. 
It was for the most part densely covered with the primz- 
val forest. In many places the tall spruce towered to the 
height of from 100 (as I calculated) to 150 feet, and were 
of unusual girth; and the great bulk of the giants of a 
former generation, which lay mouldering in slow decay, 
told that no hand of man had been there, as in districts 
more accessible, to appropriate the statliest of the products 
of the wilderness. Nature reigned in all her solitary 
majesty: her operations were uncontrolled. Every age 
was there; from those lofty piles standing erect in the 
ripe fulness of their majestic forms, to the young growth 
that, springing up in every clearance over which the 
tempest had swept, told of their direct descent from the 
atriarch of a hundred years, whose crumbling ruins they 
shrouded with a graceful shrubbery. We count the races 
of man: who shall say how many generations have here 
successively germinated and sprung up in youthful vigour 
and beauty, in a maturer age have hung out from their 
feathered boughs those pendent tassels of cones, the seed 
pods of which were destined to perpetuate their species— 
have ripened, decayed, and gone to dust—since the epoch 
of the great catastrophe which moulded these wild regions 
into their present form, and left their bared surface to the 
gentle and uniform operations with which vegetation— 
following in the track of ruin—effaces its hardest features, 
and renews the face of the earth? Touching images from 
the earliest times have been drawn from the fall of the 
leaf, as in successive years the short-lived progeny of a 
single season are thrown of from their parent stems. How 
much more striking the contemplation of the processes of 
nature in growth, decay, and reproduction, on the scale on 
which it is presented in the depths of a primeval forest ! 
‘The general character of the country was irregular, with 
no leading valleys and few levels of any extent. We 
mounted ridges of the steepest declivity, where the stunted 
pines told of the elevation at which we had arrived, to 
plunge on the other side far down into the depths of dark 
