We do not see the Forest of our forefathers. Go back eight centuries, and look at the sights which the Normans must have beheld,—dense underwoods of hollies on which the red deer browsed; masses of beech and chestnut, the haunts of the wolf and the boar; plains over which flocks of bustards half-ran, half-flew; swamps where the crane in the sedge laid its buff and crimson-streaked eggs; whilst above grey-headed kites swam in circles; and round the coast the sea-eagle slowly flapped its heavy bulk. Great oaks, shorn flat by the Channel winds, fringed the high Hordle cliffs, towering above the sea; and opposite, as to this day, rose the white chalk rocks of the Needles, and the Isle of Wight, where at Watchingwell stretched another forest of the King’s. And the sun would set as it now does, but upon all this further beauty, making a broad path of glory across the bay, till at last it sank down over the Priory Church of Christchurch, which Flambard was then building.
Gone, too, for ever all the scenes which they must have had of the Avon, glimpses of it caught among the trees as they galloped through the broad lawns, or under the sides of Godshill, and Castle Hill crested with yews and oaks.[6]
These may all be gone, but plenty of beauty is still left. 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 the shadows of the beeches play, but in the winter chafed by the torrent.
Across its broad expanse of moors the sun still sets the same in summer time—into some deep bank of clouds in the west, and as it plunges down, flashes of light run along their edges, and each thin band of vapour becomes a bar of fire, and the far-away Purbeck hills gleam with purple and amethyst.
The same sea, too, still heaves and tosses beneath the Hordle and Barton Cliffs, with the same dark patches, shadows of clouds, sailing over it, as its waves, along the shore, unroll their long scrolls of foam.
These great natural facts have not changed. Kelt and Roman have gone, but these are the same.
Nor must I forget the extraordinary lovely atmospheric effects, noticed also by Gilpin,[7] as seen, under certain conditions, from the Barton Cliffs on the Isle of Wight and the Needles. Far out at sea will rise a low white fog-bank gradually stealing to the land, enveloping some stray ship in its folds, and then by degrees encircling the Island, whilst the chalk cliffs melt into clouds. On it still steals with its thick mist, quenching the Needles Light which has been lit, till the whole island is capped with fog, and neither sea nor sky is seen,—nothing but a dense haze blotting everything. Then suddenly the wind lifts the great cloud westward, and its black curtains drop away, revealing a sky of the deepest blue, barred with lines of light: and the whole bay suddenly shines out clear and glittering, the Island cliffs flashing with opal and emerald, and the ship once more glides out safe from the darkness.
A few words, too, must be said about the two principal tree-forms which now make the Forest. The oaks here do not grow so high or so large as in many other parts of England, but they are far finer in their outlines, hanging in the distance as if rather suspended in the air than growing from the earth, but nearer, as especially at Bramble Hill, twisting their long arms, and interlacing each other into a thick roof. Now and then they take to straggling ways, running out, as with the famous Knyghtwood Oak, into mere awkward forks. The most striking are not, perhaps, so much those in their prime, as the old ruined trees at Boldrewood, their bark furrowed with age, their timber quite decayed, now only braced together by the clamps of ivy to which they once gave support and strength.[8]
The beeches are even finer, and more characteristic, though here and there a tree sometimes resembles the oaks, as if with long living amongst them, it had learnt to grow like them. The finest beech-wood is that of Mark Ash. There you may see true beech-forms, the boles spangled with silver scales of lichen, and the roots—more fangs than roots—grasping the earth, feathered with the soft green down of moss.
But not in individual trees lies the beauty of the Forest, but in the masses of wood. 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.