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

FOREST NOTES. 561
from the hunters' hounds and horses, might not you also play liide
and seek, in these groves, with all the ])angs and trepidations of man's
life, and elude Death, the mighty hunter, for more than the span of
human years 1- Here, also, crash his arrows ; here, in the farthest glade,
sounds the gallop of the pale horse. But he does not hunt this cover
with all his hounds, for the game is thin and small : and if you were
hut alert and wary, if you lodged ever in the deej^est thickets, yoxi too
might live on into later generations, and astonish men by your stalwart
age and the trophies of an immemorial success.
For the forest takes away from you all excuse to die. There is
nothing here to cabin or thwart your free desires. Here all the
impudencies of the brawling world reach you no more. You may
count your hours, like Endymion, by the strokes of the lone wood-
cutter, or by the progression of the lights and shadows, and the sun
wheeling his wide circuit through the naked heavens. Here shall you
see no enemies but winter and rough weather. And if a pang comes to
you at all, it will be a pang of healthful hunger. All the puling sor-
rows, all the carking repentance, all this talk of duty that is no duty,
in the great peace, in the pure daylight of these woods, fall away from
you like a garment. And if perchance you come forth upon an emi-
nence, where the wind blows ujjon you large and fresh, and the jjiues
knock their long stems together, like an ungainly sort of puppets, and
see far away over the plain a factory chimney defined against the pale
horizon — it is for you, as for the staid and simple peasant when, with
his plough, he upturns old arms and harness from the furrow of the
glebe. Ay, sure enough, there was a battle there in the old times ;
and, sure enough, there is a world out j^onder where men strive together
with a noise of oaths and weeping and clamorous cUspute. So much
you apprehend by an athletic act of the imagination. A faint far-off
rumour as of Merovingian wars : a legend as of some dead religion.
E. L. S.
VOL. XXXIII. — xo. 197. 27.