Woodland

“ My Woodland Study in Summer. It is an open glade in the middle of a pine-wood. Not all green and level is this glade, with trees standing round in a circle, like the clearings in forests of the Far West, which I used to read of in the novels of Cooper and that so bewitched me when a boy. No, for judging from the rough and rutty pathway that leads up to it, and from the numerous banks and hillocks in it, there can be no doubt that, in far distant days of the past, gravel must have been dug and carted hence.
The wood itself—glade and all—stands on a hill. ”

“ But the green shade of the woodland is inviting, and following the gayest and most dashing of little streams that ever ran from mountain side to woodland depths, we trace a path by the wild flowers, and pass in, deeper and deeper. ”

“ In their places are given the quiet scenes in the heart of the great woods, where few people have the leisure, and some not the strength to go—quiet brooks flowing down deep valleys, and woodland paths trod only by the cattle and the Forest workmen. ”

“ The earth seems to swallow them as they touch it, for their coloration is that of the brown leaves, and they leap from one invisibility to the next.
Beyond the frog chorus I found my stream again, dancing daintily along hemlock shaded shallows and rippling over slate ledges in the latticed shade of oak and maple twigs, and here another voice called me, a staccato whistle with a suspicion of a trill in it now and then, the voice of the very spirit of the spring woodland,—the hyla. ”

“ From the Filnbaum Forest to our very door were fields, and for thirty years the burned woodland gave our people bread. Since then our people are scattered; they have moved away, and a fresh, new, forest is beginning to grow upon the mountain sides. ”

“ And voices fill the woodland side.
Alas! how changed from the fair scene,
When birds sang out their mellow lay,
And winds were soft, and woods were green,
And the song ceased not with the day!
But still wild music is abroad,
Pale, desert woods! within your crowd ”

“ It{70} slips through clothes and flesh, nor do bones stay it till it tingles in the marrow, a vitalizing fire that is soothed and nourished by the soft essence of those dead mists, now glowing upward from the moist humus. No wonder the woodland things come to life and grow again at the touch! The north wind may howl high above. Here under the trees the soft airs that breathe out of Eden touch you and you know that just round the curve of the road is the very gate itself. ”

“ They pulled up presently, dead beat to the world, on the ridge of rocks, and flung themselves down under the shelter of one of the great forest trees. Behind them the forest stretched away mile upon mile, and on the other side of the valley the sinister woodland was equally thick and forbidding. These two fringes of wood were not more than sixty or seventy yards apart, with a shelf of rock on either side trending sharply down into the flat valley, level as a pavement and feet deep in the leaves which the winter storms and gales had reaped from the forest. ”

“ It makes an infinite number of bends and corners and angles, rounded off by a charming vegetation. Abrupt and rocky hills go with it all the way—hills with cornfields lying in their hollows and deep woods crowning their tops. Out of the woodland peep old manors, and beneath, between the hills and the stream, are high-thatched farmsteads, lying deep in their meadows and orchards, cottages pallisaded with hollyhocks, gray old Norman churches and villas flanked with big horse-chestnuts. ”

“ Deeper and deeper, and farther and farther, they advanced into the forest, encountering every variation of woodland scenery, and every alternation of forest travelling; sometimes finding it easy, again finding it difficult, yet at no time encountering any very serious obstacle. ”

“ Close to the sea the hills are bare enough; but at no great distance inland, they become rich in wood, and the Weald, whether arable or pasture, or hop-garden or orchard, is so divided into small fields by numerous hedgerows of fine trees, and so diversified by patches of woodland, that, seen at a little distance up the hill--not high enough to view it like a map--it assumes, in the leafy season, almost the look of a forest partially cleared. ”

“ It is among the rich and varied low colours of this season, in wood and field, that a true lover of nature detects some of her rarest touches of loveliness; the low western sun, falling athwart the bare boughs and striking a kind of subdued bloom into the brown hill-tops and across the furze and heather, sometimes reveals a hidden charm in the landscape which one seeks in vain when skies are softer and the green roof has been stretched over the woodland ways. ”

“ Rossmässler, in speaking of the difference between forest and woodland (Forst und Wald) , says: "Every forest is also a woodland, but not every woodland, be it ever so large, is a forest. It is the regular cultivation and economical management which turns a woodland into a forest."
This difference between forests and woodland is also indicated by the terms forester and woodman; the former term being applied to the man who advocates the perpetuation of woodland in accordance with the teachings and principles of forestry, and the latter to the man whose profession is that of felling trees. ”

“ All day long I wandered on through those wonderful woodlands, and in fact loitered so much over their infinite marvels that when sundown came all too soon there was still undulating forest everywhere, vistas of fairy glades on every hand, peopled with incredible things and echoing with sounds that excited the ears as much as other things fascinated the eyes, but no sign of the sea or my fishing village anywhere. ”

“ This is the forest that nature would spread over the land again should the white man cease in his toilsome civilization. Those of us born with a love for the woods can only regret the loss and cling the more tenaciously to every woodland tract that happily we may still have the right to protect.
On the coast plain of the southern Atlantic region another form of tree-life gives character to the forest. Here the long-leaf pine and other allied species find a congenial home, the monotonous "piney woods" covering wide tracts of level, sandy country. ”

“ Woodland, country more or less covered with natural wood applied to the uncleared or untitled districts in the British Colonies which are still in a state of nature, or largely so, even though not wooded ”

“ At sunset hour the forest was still, lonely, sweet with tang of fir and spruce, blazing in gold and red and green; and the man who glided on under the great trees seemed to blend with the colors and, disappearing, to have become a part of the wild woodland. ”

“ For what reason have I this vast range and circuit, some square miles of unfrequented forest, for my privacy, abandoned to me by men? My nearest neighbor is a mile distant, and no house is visible from any place but the hill-tops within half a mile of my own. I have my horizon bounded by woods all to myself; a distant view of the railroad where it touches the pond on the one hand, and of the fence which skirts the woodland road on the other. But for the most part it is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New England. ”

“ On either side was the thick forest, sometimes grown up with underbrush to the margin of the trace, and sometimes so open as to allow the eye to roam off to a considerable distance. Above was a dense canopy of interwoven branches. The wild and lonesome appearance, the deep shade, the interminable gloom of the woods, were frightful to our travellers. The difference between a wild forest in the simple majesty of nature, and the woodlands of cultivated countries, is very great. ”

“ The deep woodlands were not only scenes of labour where sturdy arms found constant employment, they were homes of mystery in which the young imagination loved to dwell; peopling them with half-human shapes more graceful than their stateliest trees, and half-brutal monsters more terrible than the fiercest wolf or bear. ”

“ They had the wildwood ever on their right hand, and but a little way from where they rode the wood thickened for the more part into dark and close thicket, the trees whereof were so tall that they hid the overshadowing mountains whenso they rode the bottoms, though when the way mounted on the ridges, and the trees gave back a little, they had sight of the woodland and the mountains. ”

“ In America the most widespread type of forest is the evergreen coniferous woodland of the north. ”

“ When one goes back to the woods and streams after long separation and absorption in books and affairs, he misses something which once thrilled and inspired him. The meadows are unchanged, but the light that touched them illusively, but with a lasting and incommunicable beauty, is gone; the woodlands are dim and shadowy as of old, but they are vacant of the presence that once filled them. ”

“ The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. ”

“ You pass copices of firs and beautiful woods, although in saying beautiful it is in a limited sense, for one seldom finds the really rich woodlands that are so priceless an ornament to many Surrey and Kentish lanes. ”

“ In distant landscape the copse hath seldom any effect. The beauty of a wood in a distant view arises in some degree from its tuftings which break and enrich the lights, but chiefly from its contrast with the plain, and from the grand shapes and forms, occasioned by the retiring and advancing parts of the forest, which produce vast masses of light and shade, and give effect to the whole. ”

“ And yet, when woods of this kind continue, as they sometimes do, in unpeopled countries, through half a province, they become tiresome, and prove that it is not wood, but variety of landscape, that delights the eye. ”

“ From such points of eminence as these the road sometimes runs with hurried descent, as if longing for solitude, into the heart of the woodlands, and there winds slowly and solemnly under the overshadowing branches; there are no fences here, and the sharp lines of separation between road-bed and forest were long ago erased in that quiet usurpation of man's work, which Nature never fails to make the moment she is left to herself. The ancient spell of the woods is unbroken in this leafy solitude, and no traveller in whom imagination survives can hope to escape it. ”

“ The coniferae have disappeared, and thou art draped with a deciduous foliage of livelier hue. Oaks, elms, and maples, mingle their frondage, and stretch their broad arms over thee. Though I still look upon woods that seem illimitable, I feel that the wilderness is past. My eyes are greeted by the signs of civilisation—its sounds fall upon my ear. The hewn cabin—picturesque in its rudeness—stands among prostrate trunks; and the ring of the lumberer’s axe is heard in the far depths of the forest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the wood you may hear no sound but your own muffled footsteps, the crackle of dry twigs, and the soft swish of boughs swinging back from your passage, and now and then a tree punctuating the silence with a clear resonant crack of frozen fibres and its faint echo. You hear no bird nor squirrel nor sound of woodman's axe, nor do you catch the pungent fragrance of his fire nor the subtler one of fresh-cut wood. Indeed, all odors of the forest seem frozen out of the air or locked up in their sources. No perfume drops from the odor-laden evergreens, only scentless air reaches your nostrils. ”

“ Let no one, however, think they know anything of the Forest by simply keeping to the high road and the beaten tracks. They must go into it, across the fern and the heather, and, if necessary, over the swamps, into such old woods as Barrow’s Moor, Mark Ash, Bushey Bratley, and Oakley, wandering at their own will among the trees. The best advice which I can give to see the Forest is to follow the course of one of its streams, to make it your friend and companion, and go wherever it goes. ”

“ The wood still cheerfully and unsuspiciously echoes the strokes of the axe that fells it, and while they are few and seldom, they enhance its wildness, and all the elements strive to naturalize the sound.
Now our path begins to ascend gradually to the top of this high hill, from whose precipitous south side we can look over the broad country, of forest and field and river, to the distant snowy mountains. See yonder thin column of smoke curling up through the woods from some invisible farm-house; the standard raised over some rural homestead. ”

“ A little further on, the firs were assembled in groups and clumps, and then group was joined to group. The valley grew deeper and darker, and still the same small path led on, till I found myself in the tallest and most solemn wood of firs that I have ever seen. They were sixty feet high, needle-pointed, black, and they filled the long hollow between the hills, like a dark river.
The woods alternate with fields to clothe the hills and intervales and valleys, and make a constant and lovely variety over the landscape. Sometimes they seem a shore instead of a river. ”