Black Forest

“ Night in these fastnesses is inexpressibly doleful and at times fearful. The Black Forest of Germany is not nearly so lonely, nor is the Brocken so ominous with its colossal specter as the mountain summits of the Adirondacks, clothed with evergreens and groves of birch, maple, beech, ash and cedar, in which the bear, wolf and wild-cat have their lairs. ”

“ IF ever you should travel through the country of Suabia you should take a peep at the Black Forest, not only that you may admire the magnificent pine-trees, but that you may study the people living there, for they are quite unlike any of their neighbours. The inhabitants of the Black Forest near the town of Baden are tall and broad and it would almost seem as though the invigorating scent of the pine-trees had strengthened their bodies and their characters too, for they are fearless, frank and honest. ”

“ The trail led up the hill and far into the woods. Never in doubt the hunter kept on his course; like a shadow he passed from tree to tree and from bush to bush; silently, cautiously, but rapidly he followed the tracks of the Indians. When he had penetrated the dark backwoods of the Black Forest tangled underbrush, windfalls and gullies crossed his path and rendered fast trailing impossible. Before these almost impassible barriers he stopped and peered on all sides, studying the lay of the land, the deadfalls, the gorges, and all the time keeping in mind the probable route of the redskins. ”

“ The dull red fires flickering and forming a circle of ruddy light in the depths of the black forest, flaming against the tall trunks and defining the foliage of the nearer trees, illuminate lurid groups of savage men, in every variety of shape and posture. ”

“ During the more lawless days of the Victorian gold diggings, it was the custom for travellers to wait on the verge of the forest until a sufficient number were collected to insure their passage through it in safety. Latterly, however, the place, although offering uncommon opportunities of concealment to the bushranger, has become so quiet, that no more fear is entertained by those who pass through it than on any other portion of the road. The Black Forest well deserves its name, for it is as gloomy a place as the imagination could well conceive. ”

“ Semyonov, Trenchard, Marie Ivanovna and I were now sitting together.
We left the flat fields where we had been so busy. Very slowly we began to climb the hill down which I had come this afternoon. Behind me was a great fan of country, black now under a hidden moon, dead as though our retreat from it, depriving it of the last proofs of life, had flung it back into non-existence. Before us was the black forest. Not a sound save the roll of our wheels and, sometimes, a cry from one of the wounded soldiers, not a stir of wind.... ”

“ The intricate windings of a railroad that follow charmingly the foldings of pine-clad valleys will nowadays conduct the traveller well into the more frequented portions of the Black Forest. One minute he will look down from the car window into the yawning depths of rocky gorges, with a wild torrent brawling over the stones at the bottom ”

“ I How vivid still in the memory are the sensations stirred in me years ago by the news that I was to go to a school⁠—in the Black Forest; for to the youthful imagination this was a mysterious region inhabited by charcoal-burners, fairies, robbers, and wild boars; a land of enchantment and story, truly, and not in the least a proper sort of place for a school where one would merely “learn German.” ”

“ But, when all is said, these fields of white and blots of crude black forest are but a trite and staring substitute for the infinite variety and pleasantness of the earth’s face. Even a boulder, whose front is too precipitous to have retained the snow, seems, if you come upon it in your walk, a perfect gem of colour, reminds you almost painfully of other places, and brings into your head the delights of more Arcadian days—the path across the meadow, the hazel dell, the lilies on the stream, and the scents, the colours, and the whisper of the woods. ”

“ But the broad stream itself, hurrying forward with dizzy rapidity, and rushing around the islets by which its course is interrupted, is one of the most majestic spectacles in nature. The right bank is dignified at once, and adorned, by the numerous eminences covered with wood, and interspersed with valleys, which constitute the district so well known by the name of the Black Forest, to which superstition attached so many terrors, and credulity such a variety of legends. ”

“ Descending the castled mountain, and taking the road toward the Hunter’s Lodge, the scenery becomes more and more wild; the habitations of men disappear, and pursuing your route some few hours, you find yourself at once transplanted to the most picturesque scenes of the Alleghanies. You are now in the Black Forest, one of the few spots in Europe where you behold primitive oaks, as yet undesecrated by the woodman’s axe, and land which has never been tilled by the ploughman. ”

“ They loved the Black Forest huts among the larch and hemlock trees far better than the great, strange houses in the cities, and the sighing of the wind in the woods was sweeter to them than the strains of cathedral organs: so back they went to their native mountains, to take up the work of their fathers. ”

“ From this point the world below unrolls before the gaze like an azure scroll, while above, awful in its nearness and immensity, towers the dark mass of Black Mountain, clothed with a somber forest, into the depths of which the path now plunges, and which it does not leave again until the final summit is reached. ”

“ In that part of the Black Forest included within the Grand Duchy of Baden, are to be seen the most strikingly dressed inhabitants of the whole forest. The men let nature have her own way with their beards; while their black jackets, close-fitting knee breeches, red stockings, and peaked hats bound with a broad sheaf, give them a picturesque, yet serious and commanding appearance. ”

“ The night was closing in, and the vast peaks of the Black Hills, that had loomed up white and grand in the distance, were gradually fading from view until they merged into the thickly gathering gloom, while the blasts that whirled the snow in blinding drifts about their tops, came moaning and sweeping over the bleak prairie, as if searching for some one to inclose in its icy grasp, and to strangle out of life. ”

“ After having risen several hundred feet perpendicularly, I was enabled to form an estimate of the extent of the forest, in the bosom of which sleep and moulder the monuments of the aboriginal Americans. There is no such forest existing elsewhere on the surface of this great globe. It has no parallel in nature. The Black Forest of Germany, the Thuringian Forest of Saxony, the Cross Timbers of Texas, the dense and inaccessible woods cloaking the headwaters of the Amazon and the La Plata, are mere parks in comparison. ”

“ The stay in the Black Forest, whose velvety slopes reminded them too much of the Swiss meadows and from whose points of view you could look over to the Alps on a clear day, became a torture to both the man and woman. They felt they must get away; the dark firs, the immense green forest became too monotonous for them. Should they not try some seaside resort for once? The sea is ever new. ”

“ The forest deserves its name Black Forest, because the pine-trees stand so close together that from a distance it looks as black as coal. The prettiest walk near Baden is near a lake in the woods. On the way there one passes the Russian church with its gilded domes. It is so pretty to see the gold against the dark forest. ”

“ Fancies flew pell-mell about his mind, and, lighting a cheroot, he dropped into an armchair beside the open window and let them play. Outside the blackbirds whistled in the shrubberies across the lawn. He smelt the earth and trees and flowers, the perfume of mown grass, and the bits of open heath-land far away in the heart of the woods. The summer wind stirred very faintly through the leaves. But the great New Forest hardly raised her sweeping skirts of black and purple shadow.
Mr. Bittacy, however, knew intimately every detail of that wilderness of trees within. ”

“ The importance of this feature has not been properly magnified in the Black Forest stories. Manure is evidently the Black Forester's main treasure,—his coin, his jewel, his pride, his Old Master, his keramics, his bric-a-brac, his darling, his title to public consideration, envy, veneration, and his first solicitude when he gets ready to make his will. The true Black Forest novel, if it is ever written, will be skeletoned somewhat in this way:
Skeleton for Black Forest Novel. ”

“ Not a dunghill in the village was so broad and smooth and with such clean edges as the one which Aloys built before the house of Jacob the blacksmith; for a fine dunghill is the greatest ornament to a villager's door-front in the Black Forest. ”

“ The tourist who loves to study the thousand different effects of light on forest scenery, and to converse with nature face to face under some of her most seductive aspects, cannot do better than spend a month or two in this little Moravian settlement, away from the world of noise and fashion, and surrounded by the most typical effects of Black Forest scenery. ”

“ But the Black Forest made good its reputation for enchantments. When we came to the spot where, by our map, the road should lead to Freiburg, there were only a deserted mill, with a black depth of pine growing where the road should have been. ”

“ The Pine-grove lies on the highest point of the Black Forest, for miles around which there lay at that time no village, not even a hut, for the superstitious people believed that the spot was haunted. ”

“ The forest closed in upon it from all sides, pierced only by roads that lead to picturesque villages, equally out of the world; or by glades that meandered among the trees till they stopped at a secluded farmhouse or sawmill droning away its life on some little turbulent mountain stream.
Everywhere one came across evidences that the fairy life of the deep woods mingled more or less freely with the peasant life of the village⁠—pools were haunted; certain pathways unsafe after dark; open knolls were used by the witches for their revels ”

“ Then the whole of this Black Forest region is full of legends and traditional stories, which live longer and are more easily preserved among a people where the sons and the daughters live and marry and die for the most part under the shadow of the same trees and the same thatch beneath which their fathers and mothers did the same. ”

“ These comfortable fields have been scorched with the ruin of burning homes, drenched with the tears of women hurried into exile. These orchard lanes, appropriate to the laughter of children or the silences of lovers, have rung with battle and run deep with blood. Though the race whose bane he was has gone, still stalks the sinister shadow of the Black Abbé.
The low ridge running between the dykelands of the Habitants and the dyke-lands of the Canard still carries patches of forest interspersed among its farms, for its soil is sandy and not greatly to be coveted for tillage. ”

“ With a light knapsack and a stout staff he can then follow at his leisure the lovely little paths that wind in and out amid the great trees, leading from village to village, or across the hills to the more open valleys. With no other companions than the squirrels playing among the boughs and the great buzzards circling far overhead, he may in this manner traverse wide tracts of solitary forest. He may quietly drop in upon the quaint and legend-haunted hamlets, surprising the good burghers and peasants at the occupations which have been theirs, and their fathers’ before them, for ages past. ”

“ They were well up toward the Black Hills, in a country broken with forest, hill and prairie, and interspersed with streams of every size, from the rivulet and foaming cañon to the broad, serenely-flowing river.
They were in a region infested with grizzly bears and the [17] fiercest of wild animals, and above all with the daring and treacherous Blackfeet—those dreaded red-skins of the North-West, with whom the hunters and trappers are compelled to wage unceasing warfare, and who are more feared than any tribe that the white men encounter. ”

“ They gambolled, sometimes they rose and stood half upright, they were comely in their mass and power, they rolled past him so close that he could touch them. And the black bear and the brown went with them, bears beyond counting, monsters and little ones, a splendid multitude. Beyond them, yet only a little further back, where the park-like spaces made free movement easier, rose a sea of horns and antlers like a miniature forest in the silvery moonlight. The immense tribe of deer gathered in vast throngs beneath the starlit sky. ”

“ And the first thing the Black Forester does when he gets up is to put on a pair of stout boots with wooden soles, and take a constitutional round the house. Until he has been three times up and down the stairs, he does not feel he is up. Once fully awake himself, the next thing he does is to go upstairs to the stables, and wake up a horse. (The Black Forest house being built generally on the side of a steep hill, the ground floor is at the top, and the hay-loft at the bottom.) Then the horse, it would seem, must also have its constitutional round the house ”

“ Until quite recently the inhabitants of this forest believed it inhabited by supernatural beings, and it is only latterly that they have begun to abandon the superstition, and it is remarkable that even the forest spirits, which according to legend haunt the Black Forest, are also distinguished by their different costume and habits. Thus we are assured, the Glass-manikin, a benevolent elf, of about four feet in height, is never seen in anything but a little peaked broad trimmed hat, with jerkin, knee-breeches and red stockings. ”