Under an oak, whose boughs were moss’d with age,
And high top bald with dry antiquity.[19]
And there are smooth-stemmed beech-trees, on the massive trunks of which a love-sick swain may carve the name of his beloved.
His picture of English Landscape
Into this essentially English scenery the poet introduces a fence of olive-trees around the sheep-cote, likewise “a green and gilded snake,” together with a “hungry lioness” that lies crouching on the ground, ready to spring upon a man when he awakes from sleep. But these productions of other climes were, from the dramatist’s point of view, no more out of place in his forest, than was the presence of a banished duke with his company of lords and attendants. He had created an ideal landscape out of his own Forest of Arden, and he might clothe it with such vegetation and people it with such beings as he thought that the claims of his art allowed.
Among the first sounds that greet our ears after we enter this land of enchantment are those of an invitation to hear the bird-music:
Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me,
And turn his merry note
Unto the sweet bird’s throat,