The Forest of Arden

“ In Arden, however, the question of ownership never comes into one's thoughts; that the Forest belongs to you gives you a deep joy, but there is a deeper joy in the consciousness that it belongs to everybody else.
The sense of freedom, which comes as strongly to one in Arden as the smell of the sea to one who has made a long journey from the inland, hints, I suppose, at the offence which makes the dwellers within its boundaries outlaws. For one reason or another, they have all revolted against the rule of the world, and the world has cast them out. ”

“ There is this great consolation for those who cannot live continually in the Forest of Arden: that, having once proven one's citizenship there, one can return at will. Those who have lived in Arden and have gone back again into the world, are sustained in their loneliness by the knowledge of their fellowship with a nobler community. Aliens though they are, they have yet a country to which they are loyal, not through interest, but through aspiration, imagination, faith, and love. Rosalind and I found the months in Arden all too brief ”

“ We had a good deal to learn when we first went to Arden; in fact, we still have a great deal to learn about this wonderful country, in which so many of the ideals and standards with which we were once familiar are reversed. It is one of the blessed results of living in the Forest that one is more and more conscious that he does not know and more and more eager to learn. There are no shams of any sort in Arden, and all pride in concealing one's ignorance disappears; one's chief concern is to be known precisely as he is. ”

“ Romance has been here, too, for the great forest of Arden, sacred to the memory of Shakespeare's sweetest heroine, stretched as far as to the fringe of Birmingham, where now there is another and much greater forest—the forest of innumerable tall chimneys from the great factories of the smiths, engineers and glass-blowers who have done so much to make man's life on the earth human and clean. ”

“ The murmuring stream at our door in Arden whispered to us by day and by night the sweet secret of the happiness in the Forest, where no man strives to outshine his neighbour or to encumber the free and joyous play of his life with those luxuries which are only another name for care. ”

“ Rosalind shook her head. The tears were near the surface, but she kept them back, and remembering her book she laid it on the magician's knee, open at the words Cousin Louis had written: "If we choose we may travel always in the Forest where the birds sing and the sunlight sifts through the trees; where although we sometimes grow footsore and hungry we know that the goal is sure. Just outside is the dreary desert in which, alas! many choose to walk, shutting their eyes to the beauty and peace of the Forest, and losing by the way the sacred gift of happiness." ”

“ Truth is above all things characteristic of the dwellers in Arden, and it must be frankly confessed at the beginning, therefore, that the Forest is given over entirely to outlaws; those who have committed some grave offence against the world of conventions, or who have voluntarily gone into exile out of sheer liking for a freer life. These persons are not vulgar law-breakers; they have neither blood on their hands nor ill-gotten gains in their pockets ”

“ It is even more than realizing the early dreams of youth, inspired by the perusal of Shakspeare's beautiful description of the forest of Ardennes, while thus living under the greenwood tree—thus enjoying the contemplation of nature in her wildest and most magnificent solitudes. ”

“ The wind was gone, and the sun smiling on the still leaves and dewy grass—the flood torrent of the river dancing and laughing in its light, and the calm bright air breathing with the sweet perfume of the damp plants, and all the freshness and fragrance of the forest wilderness." We back it against the forest of Ardennes!
Every true hunter is humane. What! you say—do you call it humane to persecute the unfortunate stag, the monarch of the wilds, to the death?—to drive rifle-bullets into the target of the harmless roe? ”

“ More than once it has happened that some offender has suffered so long a banishment that he has taken permanent refuge in Arden, and proved his citizenship there by some act worthy of its glorious privileges. In the Forest one comes constantly upon traces of those who, like Dante and Milton, have found there a refuge from the Philistinism of a world that often hates its children in exact proportion to their ability to give it light. For the most part, however, the outlaws who frequent the Forest suffer no longer banishment than that which they impose on themselves. ”

“ You have in front of you Bredon Hill, which is a wonderful hill, for if a man goes down the Avon by boat it goes with him--now before, and now behind--a whole day's journey--and then stands in the same place. And on the left hand you have the great Forest of Arden, and not much besides, except oak trees, which grow well in Warwickshire. ”

“ When journeying in the forest of Ardennes!
"I seem to hear her, hearing the boughs and breezes
And leaves and birds lamenting, and the waters
Murmuring flee along the verdant herbage."
MICHAEL ANGELO.
Enough. It is all seeming, and no being.
If you would know how a man speaks in earnest,
Read here this passage, where St. ”

“ These wooded lawns are more beautiful than English park scenery; all the more beautiful for the air of neglect about them, as if not much care of men were bestowed upon them, though enough to keep wildness from growing into deformity, and to make the whole scene like nature idealized—the woodland scenes the poet dreamed of—a forest of Ardennes, for instance. These lawns and gentle valleys are beautiful, moreover, with fountains flashing into marble basins, or gushing like natural cascades from rough rocks ”

“ There, in the long aisles, settles that depth of shade which no pencil can give, and that colouring which no canvas can retain, as the sunlight pierces through the green web of leaves, flinging, as it sets, a crown of gold round each tree-trunk.
Let no one, however, think they know anything of the Forest by simply keeping to the high road and the beaten tracks. ”

“ There is nothing else worth caring for in the world!" In the autumn, as usual, the wood-cutters came and cut down several of the tallest trees, and the young fir-tree, which was now grown to its full height, shuddered as the noble trees fell to the earth with a crash. After the branches were lopped off, the trunks looked so slender and bare, that they could scarcely be recognized. Then they were placed upon wagons, and drawn by horses out of the forest. ”

“ The Avon still flows on with its floating gardens of flowers—lilies and arrowhead, and the loosestrife waving its crimson plumes among the green reeds. The Forest streams, too, still flow on the same, losing themselves in the woods, eddying round and round in the deep, dark, prison-pools of their own making, and then escaping over shallows and ledges of rolled pebbles, left dry in the summer, and on which the sunlight rests, and 15 the shadows of the beeches play, but in the winter chafed by the torrent. ”

“ All these woods there are for rambles, flushed in the spring with wood-anemones and wood-sorrel, set in the green moss and the greener heather of the bilberry. Nowhere, too, in the Forest, than in these woods, have I seen more lovely sunsets. Through some deep-cut oriel of the trees have I watched the sun begin to sink, each moment burning brighter, and then suddenly its great brand of fire would fall, reddening each tree trunk, and crimson billows of clouds come rolling eastward. ”

“ Have you ever loitered in the woods on a fresh autumn day? When the sun shines calmly and clearly on the richly-tinted foliage; when the boughs creak, and the dry leaves rustle under foot. The forest seems weary of life; it can merely think, and lives in its memories of the past. A blue mist hangs about it like a dream, full of mysterious splendour, and the glistening gossamers float on the air with slow undulations—a sweet aimless musing. ”

“ The snow in the open was already as high as the horses' knees. There was no wind, only that silent sweeping of the heavens. In the depths the high branches of the redwoods groaned ominously under the stiffening weight, like giants in pain.
The forest thinned. The snow had its will of the earth. There was no refuge under the larger trees that still stood, like outposts, here and there; the branches were too high above. Once Adan suggested through his stiff lips and unruly teeth that they turn back and take refuge in some dense grove above; but Roldan shook his head peremptorily. ”

“ The whole tree conscious, aware up and down and to and fro—and, as somewhere all the forest joins on, the forest conscious and aware up and down of its history. Then the forest runs into all the forests high and low. The everlasting Forest and all its adventures!" He looked as though he rode in that forest. "Out of it comes the Tree that sheds the forests! And never once need we lose consciousness in finding that Tree! That's what Mr. Linden said to me. He said: 'You're the Ash Yggdrasil. You're all things and all people. You share them and they share you. ”

“ Behind us stands Godshill inclosure, and the Forest with its dark moors and woods. Below winds the Avon, with its orchards nestling on the hill side, stretching its silver coil of waters along the green meadows, the sunlight gleaming on each bend and turn. ”

“ As the axe cut through the stem, and divided the pith, the tree fell with a groan to the earth, conscious of pain and faintness, and forgetting all its anticipations of happiness, in sorrow at leaving its home in the forest. It knew that it should never again see its dear old companions, the trees, nor the little bushes and many-colored flowers that had grown by its side ”

“ In Orchard Valley the dew lay like silver samite on the grass, and the boughs of the apple trees were white as snow. Between the willows the Rondel river ran toward the sea, sleek and still and glassy, save where it thundered over the weir beside the prior’s mill. The bell-tower of Paradise cut the northern sky into two steel-bright halves. Over yonder beyond the river the Forest held up a cloak of mystery across the west. Its great beech trees were glimmering into green splendor and lifting a thousand crowded domes against the brilliance of the moon. ”

“ Behind us, and stretching for miles in either direction, was the great forest we had been traversing; the old Ardennes had been a forest in the times of Caesar, its narrow pathways echoing to the tread of Roman legions. In front was a richly cultivated plain, undulating gently towards the Meuse, whose silver current wound round it like a garter—the opposite bank being formed by an abrupt wall of naked rocks of grey granite, sparkling with its brilliant hues, and shining doubly in the calm stream at its foot. ”

“ There are no clocks in Arden; the sun bestows the day, and no impertinence of men destroys its charm by calculating its value and marking it with a price. The only computers of time are the great trees whose shadows register the unbroken march of light from east to west. Even the days and nights lost that painful distinctness which they had for us when they gave us a constant sense of loss, an incessant apprehension of change and age. Their shining procession leaves no such records in Arden ”

“ He would be a strange traveller who would not forsake the dusty highway and plunge into the cool tangled glades till all sense of direction is lost. For the special and peculiar beauty of this, unlike most Forest enclosures, is that there are no straight rides cutting it transversely, but the winding alleys seem of Nature’s own planting, and these make it easy to stray, one fair group of noble trees after another beckoning along the wide green ways into the heart of the wood. One may fancy one is following the direction of the road, but it is far out of sight in a few minutes. ”

“ Will the trees of the forest come to see me? I wonder if the sparrows will peep in at the windows as they fly? shall I grow faster here, and keep on all these ornaments summer and winter?" But guessing was of very little use; it made his bark ache, and this pain is as bad for a slender fir-tree, as headache is for us. At last the tapers were lighted, and then what a glistening blaze of light the tree presented! ”

“ Like woodland spectres, the fir trees crept out of the gloom, standing in military ranks by the roadside, as if curious to note what manner of ghosts were these, lumbering in their strange craft up through the long green aisles. When halting, as we often did, to rest our tired horses, the silence was absolute. One would not think a great forest could be so breathlessly still. ”

“ Hills upon hills, covered with pine and fir, stretch away from the lowlands to the distant glacier-clad mountains, and patches of green meadow gleam through the dark pine depths.
The clear blue sky changes to a faint haze in the hilly distance. The gentle air is perfumed with the odor of the forest. A Sabbath stillness broods over all. The sun has swung around to the northwest, and skims along the horizon as if loth to leave such a sweet scene.
Evening was settling down on the Norwegian saeter, or summer herd ground. Riding along the trail through the pines appeared a young man. ”

“ A creek roared softly above the low rhythmic murmur of the forest. Even these slight sounds seemed to intrude on the great primeval silence.
“What is it?” asked Helena, “the peculiar influence of these redwood forests? I have been in other forests in many parts of the world, and I have never known anything like this. It lifts one up, makes one feel capable of anything, and yet gives one a terrible longing and loneliness—when one is alone.”
“It is partly spiritual, partly sensual. The forest seems to hold in essence the two principles of the universe. Do you want to go in among these ferns? ”