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

560 FOEEST NOTES.
Germany widespread before you, like a map, dotted with old cities,
walled and spired, that dream all day on their own reflections in
the Rhine or Danvibe. You may pass the spinal cord of Europe,
and go down from Alpine glaciers to where Italy extends her marble
moles and glasses her marble palaces in the midland sea. You may
sleep in flying trains or wayside taverns. You may be wakened at
dawn by the scream of the express or the small pipe of the robin in
the hedge. For you the rain should allay the dust of the beaten road ;
the wind dry your clothes upon you as you walked. Autumn should
hang out russet peai-s and purple grapes along the lane ; inn after inn
proflTer you their cups of raw wine ; river by river receive your body
in the sultry noon. Wherever you went warm valleys and high trees
and pleasant villages should compass you about ; and light fellowships
should take you by the arm, and walk with you an hour upon your
way. You may see, from afar off", what it will come to in the end
— the weather-beaten red-nosed vagabond, consumed by a fever of
the feet, cut off" from all near touch of human sympathy, a waif, an
Ishmael, and an outcast. And yet it will seem well — and yet, in the
air of the forest, this wUl seem the best — to break all the network
bound about your feet by bu-th and old companionship and loyal love,
and bear your shovelful of phosphates to and fro, in town and country,
ixntil the hour of the great dissolvent.
Or, perhaps, you will keep to the cover. For the forest is by itself,
and forest life owns small kinship with life in the dismal land of laboui*.
Men are so far sophisticated that they cannot take the world as it is
given to them by the sight of their eyes. Not only what they see and
hear, but what they know to be behind, enter into their notion of a
place. If the sea, for instance, lie just across the hills, sea- thoughts will
come to them at intervals, and the tenor of their dreams from time to
time will siiifer a sea-change. And so here, in this forest, a knowledge
of its greatness is for much in the eflfect produced. You reckon up the
miles that lie between you and intrusion. You may walk before you all
day long, and not fear to touch the barrier of your Eden, or stumble
out of fairyland into the land of gin and steam-hammers. And there is
an old tale enhances for the imagination the grandeur of the woods of
France, and secures you in the thought of your seclusion. When
Charles VI. hunted in the time of his wild boyhood near Senlis, there
was captured an old stag, having a collar of bronze about his neck, and
these words engraved on the collar : " Csesar mihi hoc donavit." It is
no wonder if the minds of men were moved at this occurrence, and
they^ stood aghast to find themselves thus touching hands with forgotten
ages, and following an antiquity with hound and horn. And even for
you, it is scarcely in an idle curiosity that you ponder how many cen-
turies this stag had carried its free antlers through the wood, and how
many summers and winters had shone and snowed on the imperial
badge. If the extent of solemn wood could tli«s safeguard a tall stag