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50

Fanuary-Improvements.

X.

Improvements - Wood-cutting — Importance of fine Trees in Scenery - Giant Brethren - Spenser's Conception of the Forest.

MY

Y presence in the Val Ste. Véronique had the good effect of saving some trees from the woodman's axe, and by way of compensation I gave myself the pleasure of making an opening here and there to obtain glimpses of scenery, where the brushwood was as impenetrable as a jungle. Of all country occupations I think this is the most interesting, whilst planting is perhaps the most satisfactory. It is flattering to the vanity of a creature so ephemeral as man to feel that he is settling the fate of oaks that might live for a thousand years. No sentiment can be more foolishly thrown away than that which would preserve all trees until they were rotten it is best to cut them in their fullest maturity before decay begins. Still there are exceptions to this rule, and the chief of these are the cases where a tree is valuable in life, either from its position as an ornament of scenery or else from association with past generations of men. How much of the beauty of the scenery we love best may be dependent upon the magnificence of a few trees which, once gone, a hundred years would not replace, we do not adequately realize until accident or avarice has removed them. All scenery that is not

positively mountainous owes to sylvan beauty nearly all its charm and attraction, and even where trees abound the whole dignity and character of some house or village may be dependent upon the immediate neighborhood of two or three venerable oaks or walnuts. And in the heart of the forest, remote from any human habitation, there may be scenes of the most striking grandeur, which would be utterly ravaged by the destruction of some venerable company of giants who have lived there side. by side for full five hundred years. There is one such solitude in a narrow dell about a league from the Val Ste. Véronique. It is just at the end of a little valley, where a streamlet glides down a grassy slope rounded into the smoothest curves. On this slope stand twelve gigantic brethren, chestnuts, which by a happy fatality have escaped the axes of many successive generations. They have no definite association with human history; they have dwelt together in this solitude undisturbed by the fall of dynasties or the noise of distant battle-fields. No king has ever sought refuge in their foliage, no general has encamped or held council beneath their shade. Only the birds have made nests in their world of leaves, and the wild deer found repose in the coolness of their shadowy seclusion. No poet has ever sung them, no lover ever carved linked initials on their bark. And yet the man would be dead to all sylvan feeling, who could go into that valley, axe in hand, and look at these ancient brethren with a base calculation of their price. Can we not spare a narrow spot of ground, where ground is worth so little, in order that one group of trees may

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January-Spenser.

reach the limit of their age, in order that we may see both what they are and what they may become? Every sapling in the forest gains dignity from their imposing presence, and he who has once beheld them in their place may read with better understanding the verse of those great old poets who wrote when such princes of the forest might be met with more frequently in the land. Think what was Spenser's conception of the forest, and what in our own time is too often the uninteresting reality! He thought of it as a country shaded by a great roof of green foliage, which was carried on massive stems always so far apart that one or several knights could ride everywhere without inconvenience; but we find the reality to be for the most part an impenetrable jungle of young trees, that will be cut down in a year or two for firewood. Ah, let us still preserve some dwelling of sylvan majesty, where the poet may dream and the artist may study, and both may forget the cares and interests of the present! Are there not still left to us, here and there in the deep woods, such vales of ancient peace that wandering Una may haply meet us there; or some splendid knight of fairy-land, like him whose glittering crest danced joyously as the rustling foliage of an almond-tree,

'On top of greene Selinis all alone?'

XI.

Mild Winters-Arctic Sleep of Nature Beauty of Hoar-FrostFairy Work of the Hoar-Frost

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Snow Wild Boars -The Weasel - He becomes my Gamekeeper - A Snow-storm Winter Reading - Cowper's Description of the Ice-Palace - Thomson His Ficelles - The Man Lost in the Snow.

UR winter in the Val Ste. Véronique had been

hitherto one of those mild southern winters which deceive us with promises of a calm transition from the glow of autumn to the green of spring, as if there were nothing between the two seasons but an interval of grayer sky and briefer daylight, without any severity of temperature, or any white enshrouding of the departed year. Rarely, however, does the course of Nature in these latitudes entirely avoid the season of arctic sleep, and if it is delayed till the spring flowers are ready to blossom, it is almost sure to come down suddenly upon the earth, like a fit of somnolence on a weary human frame. So it happened that one day near the end of February the thermometer went down very rapidly, and every creature that was susceptible of cold. began to feel the bracing of a keener air. It was evident that we were to have real winter after all, though probably a very brief one.

It came upon us in a single night; and as men have gone to rest with hair all black or brown, and the next morning looked in the glass and seen a head white like

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February - Beauty of Hoar-Frost.

the foam of the sea, so did our forest darken in the twilight and whiten in next day's dawn.

It is certainly not my intention to trouble the reader much with mere changes of the weather, but I mention this because it produced one of those enchantments which belong to sylvan scenery, and to sylvan scenery alone. The beauty of hoar-frost is nothing by itself, nothing on naked rock or mountain, nothing in the streets of the city, and out at sea it is visible only on the ship's cordage, if by accident it may whiten it for awhile. But on sylvan landscape it settles like a fairy decoration. No human work is delicate enough to be compared with such delicacy as this, no human artificer in silver or in ivory ever wrought such visible magic as these millions of tiny spears that thrust out points of unimaginable fineness from the lightest spray's utmost extremity. The perfect beauty of this adornment is visible only on tree-branches, and most visible on the thinnest and lightest; on the dark thin twigs of the birch, that bend under the weight of a robin, or on the slender long sprays of the bird-cherry tree, that the little birds love so well. And it is not every lover of Nature, however keen his perception, however inveterate his habit of observation, who has had the good fortune, even once in his whole existence, to see the hoar-frost in perfection. It needs a calm so perfect that a ship with all her sails would sleep motionless upon the sea; it needs also a low cloud upon the earth, whose watery particles, or hollow spheres, or whatever in their infinite littleness they may be, may fall and settle slowly in the

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