9. O you gates, lift up your heads,
And be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors,
And let the King of Glory enter.
A Single Voice.
10. Who is He, this King of Glory?
Grand Chorus.
Jehovah of Hosts. He is the King of Glory.
26th.—This is the last day of our Elmore friends, the Miss Maudes’ visit; fortunately it has been very fine, for they wished to walk through the forest; and we did ramble very far. We took them to visit the blind basket-maker and the Franklins, and shewed them all the improvements that my uncle had made in the cottage; and we came home by a round-about way through an oak coppice, in which there are nice glades and pretty paths. In one of these glades there was an immense pile of oak bark; and Miss Maude told me that in May it is peeled off the young trees which are cut down in thinning the wood, and is piled up in stacks to dry, till the latter end of Autumn, when it is disposed of by weight. For this purpose there was a huge pair of scales, set up near the stack, and on this very day they began to take it down, to weigh it, and pack it in large mats, made of a kind of bent grass, in which it is sewed up, and sold to the tanners at a very high price. The different groups, some weighing, some packing, and others taking it away on drays, made a very lively scene—and Miss Maude and I each made a sketch of it.
While we were drawing, she asked me several questions about the Brazilian forests, and I endeavoured to describe to her the richness of foliage, and the majestic height of the trees, to which none here can be compared. I did not forget the great variety in our Brazil woods, where almost every tree was different from that next to it, while here, there are not more than four or five species, which you meet again and again. Nor did I omit to mention how beautifully they are ornamented, by twining and parasite plants, and yet not rendered impassable; for I repeated what I had heard a gentleman at Rio say, that such is the regularity of those great forests, that he could gallop for miles through them, without being stopped by underwood.
Both she and her sister were very much interested in the account I gave of the silk cotton trees, which spread out all their branches at such a height from the ground; and of the lecythis, with its pitcher-shaped fruit, and of the jacaranda, with its large feathered leaves of dark green, which make such a contrast with its gold-coloured flowers, some species of it so very tall and magnificent, and others with such singular tufts of whitish leaves at the ends of the branches.
They encouraged me to go on, and after describing how the dark tops of the Chilian fir mingle with all these other trees, I came to the humbler shrubs and flowers, which exhibit such a wonderful variety of tints, and then to the festoons of those twining plants, called lianes, which descend from the tops of the highest trees, or twist round the strongest trunks, till they gradually kill them.
Though many trees grow to great size here, there is certainly not that profusion of vegetation which you used to make me notice at Brazil; and there is a gravity in these English woods, which I told them is very different from the gay and flowery appearance of the woods, and even of the road-sides, in Brazil, where the hedges of myrtle, china roses, scarlet passion-flowers, and trumpet flowers, make so gay a mixture. The autumn tints, so much admired here, are perfectly dead, compared to those of South America.