THE FOREST. 
205 
oppressive, since it never fails to be relieved by the cheerful ani- 
mation of living beauty. Sweet flowers grow beside the fallen 
trees, among the shattered branches, the season through ; and the 
freedom of the woods, the unchecked growth, the careless posi- 
tion of every tree, are favorable to a thousand wild beauties, and 
fantastic forms, opening to the mind a play of fancy wh^h is in 
itself cheering and enlivening, like the bright sunbeams which 
chequer with golden light the shadowy groves. That character 
of rich variety also, stamped on all the works of the creation, is 
developed in the forest in clear and noble forms ; we are told that 
in the field we shall not find two blades of grass exactly alike, 
that in the garden we shall not gather two flowers precisely sim- 
ilar, but in those cases the lines are minute, and we do not seize 
the truth at once ; in the woods, however, the same fact stands re- 
corded in bolder lines ; we cannot fail to mark this great variety 
of detail among the trees ; we see it in their trunks, their branches, 
their foliage ; in the rude knots, the gnarled roots ; in the mosses 
and lichens which feed upon their bark ; in their forms, their col- 
oring, their shadows. And within all this luxuriance of varied 
beauty, there dwells a sweet quiet, a noble harmony, a calm re- 
pose, which we seek in vain elsewhere, in so full a measure. 
These hills, and the valleys at their feet, lay for untold centu- 
ries one vast forest; unnumbered seasons, ages of unrecorded 
time passed away while they made part of the boundless wilder- 
ness of woods. The trees waved over the valleys, they rose upon 
the swelling knolls, they filled the hollows, they crowded the nar- 
row glens, they shaded the brooks and springs, they washed their 
roots in the lakes and rivers, they stood upon the islands, they 
swept over the broad hills, they crowned the heads of all the moun- 
