And Love resumes her sceptre and her reign.

'Ras'd from our fields is battle's murderous stain,

And sons of Saxon serfs walk forth like men.

Oh! hasten, Time, and bring that glorious day,

When every art of violence shall fade;

E'en warlike mem'ries shrink from truth's pure ray,

And swords and spears rest in th' ignoble shade.

76

CHAPTER IV.

OLD FOREST TREES.

Here in full light the russet plains extend,
There, wrapt in clouds, the bluish hills ascend;
E'en the wild heath displays her purple dyes,
And midst the desert fruitful fields arise,

That crowned with tufted trees and springing corn,
Like verdant isles the sable waste adorn.
Let India boast her plants; nor envy we
The weeping amber of the balmy tree,
While by our OAKS the precious loads are borne,
And realms commanded which those trees adorn.

POPE.

TREES have always been objects of national veneration. In the earliest stages of society they have always drawn forth feelings of veneration; and every land, whilst it has had some tree especially and peculiarly honoured, has given to all its forests and its woods presiding deities. Forests have been, and are still, temples; Nature's noblest sanctuaries; there, arches bend and pillars rise; there the green fretwork shews the hand of the mighty Architect; and though the swell and the peal of the organ is never heard rolling its deep and solemn chantings as in the nave of the old proud cathedral,

yet there the sweeping winds make melody in their full and noble notes, or faintly dying cadences; and though there be no long columned aisle, where the stately hatchment speaks of the ancestral pomp of the coffined dust over which it stands; and though there be no marble bust, looking down through the mists of ages, and telling of the deeds of glory or of shame; and though there be no tessalated pavement or rent banners, or echoing vaults, or stoled priest, or brilliant candelabra, they nevertheless are temples in which God may be worshipped and seen. For here it was that

the world's first fathers raised their earliest hymns; into the midst of forest shades the bright spirits of another world descended, and spoke to man of immortality; hither the lovers of retirement withdrew as a busy world sickened on the mind, and from thence they gave forth thoughts which were to delight, and enlighten posterity. Euripides meditated in a wood; Eriphanis composed her poems amidst the sylvan scenery of Greece; and to these solitudes holy men have retired to meditate and pray, in all ages of the Christian era. The beautiful fable of Numa and Egeria, will never wear out of the memory, nor that still more beautiful British Mythos of Artegal and Elidure. And without entering into the superstitious belief of our ancient forefathers, without believing them to be the residence of the Dryad and the Hamadryad, without peopling them with the Faun and the Nympholepsy, with which they peopled them; without supposing, as our Gothic sires

supposed, that every tree possesses its own particular spirit, wandering forth from its heart at the midnight hour to walk the green-sward: depriving the forest monarchs of this, their false sanctity, they are nevertheless invested with a sublimity and a sacredness peculiarly their own, and eloquent is the breeze as it floats in music through their branches, and dreamy is the spell which the moon wakes as her silvery beams fall on their leaflets; forests and woods are the depositaries of inspiration; in every season man may find his spirit fired and his heart made holier and happier; indeed the lover of forest scenery must ever have his thoughts wandering upwards, since everything around him tends to elevate and dignify the soul.

But now, far from the forest scenery of Arcadia and the Morea, the forests and trees of Old England claim our regard; and if England has not many forests left to her, she has some trees she can boast of yet. Time was, when this forest, wild, savage, and impassable, stretched its vast arms from the heights of Dover to the windings of the Tyne; nor are the days very far removed, when the traveller, in his journeyings through England, was compelled to pass many a dark and gloomy wood upon his way; those days and scenes have passed; those old trees have long been felled; and the spots where once they flourished are now the streets of towns and villages, the foundations of rich halls and temples: but still, in the soul of the Englishman, there burns an instinctive love to the old sylvan haunts; to the woods,

where his forefathers had their habitation; the spirit of Teutonic ancestry seems to linger in him; for surely an Englishman may be said to be a child of the woods The brave German people came from thence. The liberty, the idea of personal freedom, which peculiarly haunt the voices and the ways of a mighty forest, the reflective life, which the forest scenery, beyond any other, possesses the power to impart to the mind, for these characteristics, who shall say, in how eminent a degree, he is indebted to his parentage? and something like this love of the parent is shown still, for in every spot of England, wherever the children of the land, the labourer, or the peasant, can escape to the magnificent liberty, the pomp, and green, and gold, of the gay old woods, from the pent up cities and poisonous alleys of the large towns, thither away they go, as if they felt it to be a blessed thing to breathe the native air, wafted from the fields of the infancy of the race.

But, my merry masters, if the forest be not an important item in the inventory of Old England, what that is national shall be mentioned? for the depths of the forest shades beheld strange deeds in the dark ages. A splendid and strange cavalcade could we evoke up, if we gave both memory and history their way; to the forest came thronging the outlawed bands of liberty, the brave Saxons who refused to submit to the Norman yoke; the shades covered them, the deep glades received them, safe from the pursuit of kings too busy on their crusades, or old fat