296 
BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 
and then lose them again behind a forest of silvery 
stems, whose dark-green leafy summits shed on the 
brown slopes and grassy avenues below a calm and 
softened twilight. It would be impossible to gaze on 
such a scene as this without thinking of Longfellow's 
lovely stanzas:— 
“ Before me rose an avenue 
Of tall and sombrous pines, 
Abroad their fan-like branches grew, 
And, where the sunshine darted through, 
Spread a vapour soft and blue, 
In long and sloping lines. 
“ And falling on my weary brain, 
Like a fast-falling shower, 
The dreams of youth come back again,— 
Lov lispings of the summer rain 
Dropping on the ripened grain, 
As once upon the flower.” 
When you get up there, underneath the rich festoons 
of foliage, and feel your eyes aching with the strange 
intersections of the stems crossing each other, and 
thinned here and there by time or accident, and observe 
the cones and broken twigs which sprinkle the green 
sward, you think of Wordsworth's “sheddings of the 
pining umbrage," and of those firs which live in their 
green beauty for ever in his graphic verse, and perhaps 
you detect yourself involuntarily quoting the lines :— 
-“ Above my bead, 
At every impulse of the moving breeze, 
The fir-grove murmurs with a sea-like sound.” 
Lundies of poetical associations come tumbling upon 
