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 wildness 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 
a 
