Then on for a few miles, bivouacking for the night in an inn yard, in order that we might return to Southampton and see the play.
Next day we reached Lyndhurst, and came safely to anchor in a meadow behind the old Crown Hotel, and this field we made our headquarters for several days.
It had always been my ambition to see something of the New Forest, and here I was in the centre of it. I had so often read about this wondrous Forest; I had thought about it, dreamt about it, and more than once it had found its way into the tales I wrote. And now I found the real to exceed the imaginary.
One great beauty about the New Forest is that it is open. There is nothing here of the sombre gloom of the Scottish pine wood. There are great green glades in it, and wide wild patches of heatherland. Even at the places where the trees are thickest the giant oaks thrust their arms out on every side as if to keep the other trees off.
“Stand back,” they seem to say. “We will not be crowded. We must not keep away the sunshine from the grass and the brackens beneath us, for all that has life loves the light. Stand back.”
What charmed me most in this Forest? I can hardly tell. Perhaps its gnarled and ancient oaks, that carried my thoughts back to the almost forgotten past; perhaps its treescapes in general, now with the tints of autumn burnishing their foliage; perhaps its glades, carpeted with soft green moss and grass, and surrounded with brackens branched and lofty, under which surely fairies still do dwell.
They say that the modern man is but a savage reformed by artificial means, and if left to himself would relapse to his pristine state. Well, if ever I should relapse thus, I’d live in the New Forest. Referring to the forest, Galpin says—“Within equal limits, perhaps, few parts of England afford a greater variety of beautiful landscapes than this New Forest. Its woody scenes, its extended lawns, and vast sweeps of wild country, unlimited by artificial boundaries, together with its river views and distant coasts, are all in a great degree magnificent. (There have been many portions of the Forest enclosed since these lines were written, but their gates are never closed against the stranger or sight-seer.) Still, it must be remembered that its chief characteristic, and what it rests on for distinction, is not sublimity but sylvan beauty.”
And this last line of Galpin’s naturally enough leads my thoughts away northward to the wild Highlands of Scotland, where sublimity is in advance of sylvan beauty, and brings the words of Wilson to my mind:—
“What lonely magnificence stretches around,
Each sight how sublime, how awful each sound,
All hushed and serene as a region of dreams,
The mountains repose ’mid the roar of the streams.”
I have mentioned the wide-spreading oak-trees. Is it not possible that the mountain firs of our Scottish Highlands would spread also had they room? I mean if they were not planted so thickly, and had not to expend their growth in towering skywards in search of sunlight, their stems all brown and bare beneath, till looking into a pine wood is like looking into some vast cave, its dark roof supported by pillars.