First, and most lovely, the glades and reaches of gentle park and meadow, where the beech–tree invades not seriously, or, at any rate, not with discipline, but straggles about like a tall centurion amused by ancient Britons. Here are the openings winged with fern, and ruffling to the west wind; and the crimped oval leaves of the alder rustle over the backs of the bathing cows. In and out we glance, or gaze, through the groined arcade of trees, where the sun goes wandering softly, as if with his hand before his eyes. Of such kind is the Queenʼs Bower Wood, beside the Boldre Water.
Of the second type, most grand and solemn, is the tall beech–forest, darkening the brow of some lonely hill, and draping the bosomed valleys. Such is Mark Ash Wood, four miles to the west of Lyndhurst. Overhead, is the vast cool canopy; underfoot, the soft brown carpet, woven by a thousand autumns. No puny underwood foils the gaze, no coppice–whispers circulate; on high there moves one long, unbroken, and mysterious murmur, and all below grey twilight broods in a lake of silent shadow. Through this the ancient columns rising, smooth, dove–coloured, or glimpsed with moss, others fluted, crannied, bulging, hulked at the reevings of some great limb; others twisted spirally and tortuously rooting; a thousand giants receding, clustering, opening lattice–peeps between them, standing forth to stop the view, or glancing some busy slant of light—in the massive depth of gloom they seem almost to glide.
The third and most rudely sylvan form is that of the enclosures, where the intolerant beech is absent, and the oak, the spruce, and the Spanish chestnut protect the hazel, the fern and bramble, the dog–rose and the honeysuckle.
In a bowering, gleaming, twinkling valley, such as I have first described, we saw Miss Amy Rosedew admiring her own perfections; and now, some three months afterwards, a certain young lady, not wholly unlike her, is roaming in a deep enclosure, thick with oaks and underwood. It lies about a furlong from the western lodge of Nowelhurst, and stretches away towards the sunset, far from the eye of house or hut. Even the lonely peatman, who camps (or camped, while so allowed) beneath the open sky, wherever the waste yields labour freely, and no prescription bars him—even he finds nothing here to draw his sauntering footstep. The gorse prefers more open places, the nuts are few and hard to reach, the fuel–turf is not worth cutting, and the fuel–wood he dare not hew. In short, there is nothing there to tempt him. As for shade, and solitude, and the crystal rill, he gets a deal too much of that sort of thing already.
By the side of that crystal rill, and where the trees hung thickest, in the grey gloom of that Michaelmas evening, walked the aforesaid maiden, and (what we had not bargained for) a gentle youth beside her. The light between the lapping boughs and leaves—whose summer whisper grew hoarse in autumnʼs rustle—the clouded light fell charily, but showed the figures comely, as either could wish of the other.
The maidenʼs face was turned away, but one hand lay in her loverʼs; with the other she was drawing close the loose folds of her mantle—her flushing cheek was glad of shade, and the grass thought her feet were trembling.
His eager, glistening, wavering eyes told of hope with fear behind it; and all his life was waiting for a word or look. But for the moment neither came. She trembled more and more before him, and withdrew a little, as the silver–weed at her feet withdrew from the runnelʼs passion. She thought he would yet say more—she longed for him to say more; oh that her heart would be quiet!
But never another word he said, till she turned to him, sadly and proudly, with her soft eyes full of tears.
“Mr. Nowell, you are very eloquent; but you do not know what love is”.
She lifted her left hand towards her heart, but was too proud to put it there, and dropped it, hiding the movement.