Nowhere round the globe are the forests finer than on this continent of ours. Boundless in extent and endless in diversity, the eye never wearies of resting upon them or seeking to penetrate their depths. Happily free as they are from the dense matted undergrowth that makes progress through the forests of the tropics a continuous penitential pilgrimage, they present glorious vistas of silvan shade, shot through with golden shafts of sunlight, down which you may wander at your ease in unchecked communion with nature.
By way of comparison just place these two pictures side by side.
Seeking to give some conception of the interminable Congo forest, in which he spent so many months of misery, Stanley exclaims: "Take a thick Scottish copse dripping with rain; imagine this copse to be a mere undergrowth, nourished under the impenetrable shade of ancient trees, ranging from one hundred feet to one hundred and eighty feet high; briers and thorns abundant; lazy creeks meandering through the depths of the jungle, and sometimes a deep affluent of a great river. Imagine this forest and jungle in all stages of decay and growth—old trees falling, leaning perilously over, fallen prostrate: ants and insects of all kinds, sizes, and colours murmuring around; monkeys and chimpanzees above, queer noises of birds and animals, crashes in the jungle as troops of elephants rush away; rain pattering down on you every other day in the year; an impure atmosphere, with its dread consequences, fever and dysentery, gloom throughout the day and darkness almost palpable throughout the night."
Turn now to Parkman, who knows and loves his forests as Miss Murfree her mountains, and who has once and for all time painted the picture of the great American forest: "Deep recesses, where, veiled in foliage, some wild, shy rivulet steals with timid music through breathless caves of verdure; gulfs where feathered crags rise like castle walls, where the noonday sun pierces with keen rays athwart the torrent, and the mossed arms of fallen pines cast wandering shadows on the illumined foam; pools of liquid crystal turned emerald in the reflected green of impending woods; rocks on whose rugged front the gleam of sunlit waters dances in quivering light; ancient trees hurled headlong by the storm to dam the raging stream with their forlorn and savage ruin; or the stern depths of immemorial forests, dim and silent as a cavern, columned with innumerable trunks, each like an Atlas upholding its world of leaves, and sweating perpetual moisture down its dark and channelled rind—some strong in youth, some gouty with decrepit age, nightmares of strange distortion, gnarled and knotted with wens and goitres, roots intertwined beneath like serpents petrified in an agony of contorted strife: green and glistening mosses carpeting the rough ground, mantling the rocks, turning pulpy stumps to mounds of verdure, and swathing fallen trunks, as, bent in the impotence of rottenness, they lie outstretched over knoll and hollow like mouldering reptiles of the primeval world, while around, and on, and through them springs the young growth that fattens on their decay—the forest devouring its own dead. Or, to turn from its funereal shade to the light and life, to the open woodland, the sheen of sparkling lakes, and mountains basking in the glory of the summer noon, flecked by the shadows of passing clouds that sail on snowy wings across the transparent azure."
No pestilent fever or insidious deadly miasma lurks in our forests. On the contrary, their pure, piny breath brings back health to many an ailing mortal, and beneath their feathery hemlocks and aromatic spruces one may lie down at night in sweet security from snakes, or centipedes, or other crawling horrors that make each night in a tropical forest a period of peril.
Is there one of us recalling the life of the coureurs de bois, the men who above all others made the trackless forest their own, does not feel a stirring of the pulses of admiration and envy, and a pathetic regret that those romantic days in which they flourished are over for ever? They were the natural outcome of the beaver trade, which in the earliest stage of Canadian history formed the struggling French colony's chief source of support. All that was most active and vigorous in the colony took to the woods, thereby escaping from the oppressive control of intendants, councils, and priests, to the savage freedom of the wilderness. Not only were the possible profits great, but in the pursuit of them there was a fascinating element of adventure and danger, which irresistibly appeals to the spirit of enterprise and daring that civilization has not yet quite extinguished within our breasts.
Though not a very valuable member of society, and a thorn in the side of princes and rulers, the coureur do bois had his uses, at least from an artistic point of view; and his strange figure, sometimes brutally savage, but oftener marked with the lines of a dare-devil courage, and a reckless, thoughtless gaiety, will always be joined to the memories of that grand world of woods which the nineteenth century is fast civilizing out of existence.
COUREUR DE BOIS. Page 244.
Lost in the forest! What a thrill runs swift to the heart as we repeat the words! Ever since our young eyes overflowed at the immortal legend of the babes in the wood, sleeping the sleep that knew no awakening beneath the leafy winding-sheet brought them by their bird mourners, we seem to have had a clear conception of all the terrors the phrase implies, and we follow with throbbing pulses and bated breath the recital of such an experience as the foremost and noblest of all the pioneers of these North American forests had.