Non-Fiction > Uncollected essays > Volumes 33-38, 1876-1878 - Cornhill magazine > Volume 33

55~6 rOREST NOTES.
The Woods in Speing.
I think you will like the forest best in the sharp early springtime,
when it is jnst beginning to reawaken and innumerable violets peep from
among the fell en leaves; when two or three people at most sit clown to
dinner; and, at table, you will do well to keep a rug about yonr knees, for
the nights are chill, and the salle-a-manger opens on the court. There is
less to distract the attention for one thing, and the forest is more itself;
it is not bedotted with artists' sunshades as with unknown mushrooms,
nor bestrewn with the remains of English picnics. The hunting still
goes on, and at any moment your heart may be brought into your
mouth as jow hear far-away horns, or you may be told by an agitated
l^easantthat the Yicomte has gone up the avenue, not ten minutes since,
" a fond de train, monsieur, et avec douze piqueurs."
If you go up to some coign of A^antage in the system of low hills that
permeates the forest, you will see many different tracts of country, each
of its own cold and melancholy neuti-al tint, and all mixed together and
mingled one into the other at the seams. You will see tracts of leafless
beeches of a faint yellowish gray, and leafless oaks a little ruddier in the
hue. Then zones of pine of a solemn green, and, dotted among the pines
or standing by themselves in rocky clearings, the delicate snow-white
trunks of birches, spreading out into snow-white branches yet more deli-
cate, and crowned and canopied with a purple haze of twigs. And then
a long bare ridge of tumbled boulders, with bright sandbreaks between
them, and wavering sandy roads among the bracken and brown heather.
It is all rather cold and unhomely ; it has not the perfect beauty, not the
gemlike colouring, of the wood in the later year, when it is no more
than one vast colonnade of verdant shadow, tremiilous with insects,
intersected here and there by lanes of sunlight set in puii^le heather.
The loveliness of the woods in March is not, assuredly, of this blowsy,
rustic type. It is made shaq) with a grain of salt, with a touch of
ugliness ; it has a sting like the sting of bitter ale ; you acquire the love
of it as men acquire a taste for olives. And the wonderful clear, pure
air wells into your lungs the while, by voluptuous inhalations, and makes
the eyes bright, and sets the heart ticking to a new tune. Or rather, to
an old tune ; for you remember in your boyhood something akin to this
spirit of adventure, this thirst for exploration, that now takes you
masterfully by the hand, plunges you into many a deep grove and drags
you over many a stony crest. It is as though the whole wood were full
of friendly voices calling you ftirther in, and you tui'u from one side to
another, like Buridan's donkey, in a maze of pleasure.
Comely beeches send up their Avhite, straight, clustered branches,
barred with green moss, like so many fingers from a half-clenched
hand. Mighty oaks stand to the ankles in a fine tracery of underwood ;