ment of mighty forests is rent away by his savage grasp. Even the solid fortresses of rocks are no protection to her violated majesty. These are still deeper outrages than any before enumerated; for men may seem to have some right over the works of their mortal predecessors; but by what charter do they rend and disfigure the fair dwelling-house which God has given them for their service, and not for their abuse? The love of money is the root of all evil, says the voice of Wisdom. Certainly it is the origin of this; "Thou art the cause that levels every tree, And woods bow down to form a way for thee." wanting. Modern architects laugh at the vast beams, the solid framework, of an ancient dwelling; but will their edifices last as long? do they possess the same enduring principle? It is wise to undervalue what one cannot attain. The great cause of the scarcity of fine timber is, that, like the impatient possessor of the goose with golden eggs, we cannot endure to wait for slow and future profit. With the short-sighted eagerness of cupidity, we cut down the thriving timber before it has attained a quarter of its growth. I have travelled much over England of late; and except in the preserved parks of the wealthy aristocracy, I have scarcely met with a single large tree. That timber should be cut for use, is right and fit; that woods should be thinned, is, indeed, essential to their welldoing; but I own that it makes my sexagenarian blood boil as it did at twenty, when I see a whole country swept with the besom of desolation Every thing now-a-days must be turned to account. There is no generous consecration of even the most worthless elements of natural loveliness no flinging in of the meanest dole for beauty's sake. Wherever a farthing can be made, the plough-share of ruin is driven. The ghost of Paley rejoices in the Elysian, shades, as each new-like the champaign about Reading, comer to Hades reports the progress of his doctrine of expediency. We are all for utility; and it would be well that it should be so, if, like the boar of the forest, which delves up the flower to get at the root, we had no instincts beyond those of selfsustenance. But, as we have the immortal power of imagination, we are bound to provide nutriment for that celestial part of us, not less than for that which we hold in common with the brutes. Why then is the mere money-getter become an animal so common? Why do we meet with whole districts full of mean wretches, who estimate every landscape by the number of productive acres it contains, and admire all trees according to the loads of timber into which they will cut up? These are men, who, if half-a-dozen elms, which had for years been the delight of a whole neighbourhood, could produce half-a-dozen pounds, would sentence them without remorse. The destruction of growing timber throughout our island is a serious subject. Where are the oak forests, the chesnut groves, which once supplied England with rafters for her cathedrals, and gave stability to her yet enduring churches? Wealth itself cannot now build as our forefathers built; for the material is for instance, the sole beauty of which consisted in the noble trees that once concealed its flatness. In proportion as the luxuries of life are worshipped, the beauties of nature are sacrificed. The modern improvement in the most noble science of road-making, is one immediate cause of the decay in picturesque scenery. Next to getting money, rapid travelling seems to be the great passion of the English. To save half a mile in a distance of fifty, the graceful curve must be controlled into the formal straight line, the grassy slope is to be broken up, the wild glen disfigured, the fair enclosure violated, and the vicinity to be strewn with wrecks, over which it will take years for nature to throw her pitying mantle. Roads were once pleasant to be travelled, not only by the rich, whirled along in their air-tight chariots, but by the poor wayfaring man; for trees arose in the hedge-row to defend him from the spring shower, the summer sun, the capricious autumn gale, and the piercing winter blast. dern wisdom has decreed that roads must be stripped as bare as the axe and the shears can make them. Even the poor solitary beech, which overhung the rocky declivity at the entrance to our village, stretching its gnarled roots along the mossy bank But mo (the violet's cushion), was given over to the zeal of the enemy. Unfortunate tree! Being indicted and put upon thy trial, thou wert found guilty of the unpardonable crimes of sheltering the houseless wanderer, of forming a seat for the musing poet, of protecting the sports of the village children; and further, and above all, of costing the parish a shilling a-year by injuring the road beneath with the drip of thy luxuriant leaves! To this last article in the catalogue of treason I should have begged leave to put in a demurrer; for if we had set against the moisture which it dropped upon the road, all the hail, rain, and snow which it kept away from it, I think the tree must have come off with flying branches. There is no doubt that roads are injured by too close a border of foliage, but I should think that large trees here and there would be rather beneficial than otherwise. At any rate, we might surely contrive to combine utility, agreeableness, and beauty, by making our roads wide enough (as in France) to admit of bordering trees for shelter and adornment, and yet to leave a free passage for the air and light. Agriculture also goes to the extreme of a good principle, in almost extirpating the hedge-rows of her wide domain, or at best diversifying them only by reversed brooms, miscalled elm-trees. Let me not be mistaken. I am not contending for even a preference to beauty before utility, I would have them mutually play into each other's hands, as I devoutly believe they might be made to do. Being a bit of a farmer myself, though I daresay, gentle reader, you have taken me all this time for a mad poet, I do affirm, foi de connoisseur, that a judicious attention to picturesque appearance will never make twopence a-year difference to any body. But even supposing that some small sacrifice were demanded, shall we, who give so much to obtain the luxuries of art, contribute nothing towards procuring the luxuries of nature? Thus far I will own to a touch of romance-that, when I see laid prostrate before its prime the branchless and leafless trunk of a young tree, which I have but lately beheld standing erect in all the pride of its new foliage, (for nature's festival is the season for such atrocities,) wan toning with the vernal breeze, and holding up its rejoicing hands to catch the vernal shower, I look upon the poor denuded thing as sadly as if it were the corpse of a once glorious and living object. Moreover, I would give-I will not say how much to see, even in the fine poetic frenzy of Wordsworth, England in all its pomp of primeval forests "When stalk'd the Bison from his shaggy lair, Thousands of years before the silent air Was pierced by whizzing shafts of hunter keen." Sonnets on the Duddon. If Cumberland be now so grand in the barren majesty of its mountains, so beautiful in the silver loveliness of its lakes, what must it have been when every vale was replenished with the giants of the vegetable creation, when every expanse of water was the mirror to rich and ample woods? I have heard it said, that, even within the memory of man, a squirrel could have gone from some one lake to another without touching the ground. That a change so striking should have taken place in so short a period makes one tremble for the future. Goldsmith says that Arabia Petræa is only a desert from Once rich in exhausted fertility. groves and corn-fields, its vegetable matter being consumed by an overpopulation, left no material of reproduction. Such, possibly, may be England's fate, (though I own that I do not expect to live to see it), when every least relic of her once glorious forests shall have disappeared, when the treeless soil, being robbed of its natural support, shall have parched away into an iron-bound and inhospitable wilderness. I said that rocks even were no certain barriers to our destructive rage. If any one doubt the reality of this assertion, let him go to Clifton. He will hear the hourly explosions of the gunpowder which is destroying one of the finest pieces of natural scenery in England; he will see the majestic rocks, that once impended over the Avon, thrown back into comparative insignificance, while their venerable tints, rich from the lichens of many centuries, give place to the red hue of the soil beneaththe only barrier to the spoiler's hand; dicular rock, that rose to the height of a hundred feet above the house, with all its fretted surface, its alpine fir-trees, its tresses of drooping ivy, and its silvery birches, was goneabsolutely gone like a summer mist, and in its place was the very minikin slope of a grassy hill, smooth and bald as the forehead of a Chinese, save that certain zig-zag paths conducted to a sort of turn-about sentry's box on the summit. Surely the dislike, manifested in this one particular instance of bad taste, to the rough, the rude, and the majestic, is become epidemic. Wherever we and he will be told that all this havoc is caused by a man of twenty thousand a-year, for the sake of an accession of forty pounds to his annual income! This is another sin, for which our Macadamized roads have to answer. Our coaches bowl along in triumph over the pulverized remains of the sublime and beautiful, which (as Southey says) are sold by the boatload, and measured by the ton. On a smaller scale these injuries are common; and even I, in my generation, have had to follow, as a mourner, the desolating footsteps of what is called Improvement Improvement! Oh how I hate the term! After an absence of ten years, I revisited my birth-place. The house, in which I first drew this mortal breath of sighs and laughter, had passed into other hands, and with a sorrowful foreboding as well as a sorrowful remembrance, I turned from the neighbouring village (little altered except in an accession of some square brick lodgements) towards the road which conducted to the mansion. Here I rubbed my eyes and asked if I was awake. The road was in very deed a road, smooth and open enough to have gladdened the heart of Macadam as much as it depressed mine. I remembered it a romantic lane, bordered by a high rock, half-way up which twined a path for foot-passengers, now seen through, now hidden by fantastic foliage, while frequently from amongst the boughs would peep the red cloak of the peasant girl returning from market, or the light laugh of the bounding band of children just let loose from school would come merrily upon the ear. The rocky footpath had been thrown down to make and to widen the road beneath, and there was an end of it. As I emerged from the avenue leading directly to the house, my heart beat quick, and a mist came over my eyes. I stopped for a moment at the turn beyond which the dear old mansion would, I knew, break upon the sight. During that pause, thought, with her wonted rapidity, had anticipated every possible alteration; the destruction of favourite trees; the erection of hideous summer-houses; the converting of lawn into water, and of water into lawn:-but I advanced, and it was none of these. The rock, the solid rock, the perpen go, we find the face of nature, as much as lies in man's power, "shaven with the scythe, and levelled with the roller." Even a poor countryman said to me the other day, while I was admiring a cottage backed by a fine rock, "Aye, sir, it would be a nice place if the rock were made a bit smooth." In that entertaining late publication, the Journal of a Naturalist, the author relates the following anecdote: "A ruin in the west of England once interested me greatly. The design of revisiting it and drawing it was expressed at the time. A few days only elapsed; but the inhabitant of a neighbouring cottage had most kindly laboured hard in the interval, and pulled down all the nasty ivy, that the gentleman might see the ruin." Apropos of ivy. I cannot forbear, in compas sion to the author of the Naturalist's Journal, endeavouring to enlighten him as to the " cause and basis of his regard" for the ivy-mantled ruin, with respect to which he seems more puzzled than beseems so sensible a writer. As I doubt not that he is wise enough to take in Blackwood, I beg to suggest, through this medium of communication, that ivy pleases the eye because it gives variety of outline, and variety of colour. Although it may be true (as he affirms) that " the main body of the ivy is dark, sombre, massy," yet let him remember, that dark masses are the grand producers of pictorial effect. Moreover, the ivy, although "deuil de l'été," is also " parure des hivers." It is, in fact, the most summer-like green of winter, and looks like a youthful bride beside the antique fir, and the funereal yew. Ivy pleases the heart, because it seems to connect the living with the dead. It may be "a modern upstart, a usurper,". (hard terms, Mr Naturalist,) but it links the present to the past with its glossy tendrils. Then, as to its effect upon the imagination. Think of the similes it has furnished: -the broken heart concealed by a smiling face; all green and wildly fresh without, but worn and grey beneath; Constancy, faithful in misfortune-dying where she entwines herself; Benevolence casting a mantle over distress; Gratitude repaying the support it has received by the support it bestows, &c. &c. &c. What signifies a pin our knowing that the ivy delights in waste and ruin," and is harmful to our trees, when we feel that it is beautiful? Pray, Mr Naturalist, how long, or in how many particulars, have our likes and dislikes been governed by reason? In common gratitude for my having set your mind at rest upon this painful topic, I trust that you will resolve to me a darker riddle, which puzzles even my organs of ratiocination. Since the line of beauty is a curve, and as acute angles are almost unknown in nature, why should the form of the pointed gable, employed in old buildings, be so agreeable to the eye? A letter addressed to me at Hall, near will be sure to find me, or, if you shape your reply in the form of an article to Mr Blackwood, I dare say that he and the public will be equally delighted. Pray lose no time, for soon, I imagine, neither ivy nor gables will be left to please or to perplex you or myself. Ivy is too wanton, too rambling, too picturesque for this gene ration. It is disorderly enough to come under the late Police Act, and is surely too much of a vagrant to be suffered to wander abroad over the tabula rasa of civilised England. With what perseverance we labour to subdue nature, the very success of our efforts sufficiently indicates. For she hath a rebellious will, a reclaiming force within herself, an antidotal power, whereby, if at all left to her own operations, she repairs the ravages of man. See how she enamels even the formal stone wall with her many-coloured lichens; how her rains, her winds, displace a stone here, and a stone there, until she has in some sort assimilated it to her do VOL. XXVII, NO. CLXII. A minion! See how she hangs her ivy veil over the shame of the lopped tree, and persists in thrusting out her boughs, in defiance to all rule, with the dews of each returning spring! Observe how she scatters her principles of life wherever a seed can float, or a root can cling, and adds a plume to the helmeted rock, or a banner to the roofless ruin! Yet man continues to counteract her! Even her gushing, bounding heritage of waters is not her freehold. The indignant stream, that leaps from crag to crag in the wildest and most sequestered glen, may be tasked to turn the dizzying wheels of some polluted and polluting manufactory. Nay, the loveliest spots are most frequently so profaned, as if man delighted, with his own hand, to fulfil the original curse upon this earth and upon himself, and to prevent the eye or heart from forgetting, for a moment, the primal malediction. mongst the modern deformities that disfigure the pure element of water, the steam-boat claims pre-eminence. Every variety of ship, boat, or vessel, is beautiful, except this. There is no grander object than a leviathan of the brine, with all her sails set, and her spars and rigging in the exquisite order of naval discipline: the power of man appears in none of his works more conspicuously; such mighty daring is there in the very thought of subduing the tremendous ocean to his purposes, and of making his path upon the unfathomed deep. Beautiful, again, is the light symmetry of the vessels that skim before the gale, and catch the summer sunshine upon their glancing wings; glad and joyous are the little boats that dance, like sea-birds, from wave to wave. But what beauty, what gladness, is there in yonder shapeless hulk that carries the smoke, together with the vulgarity of the metropolis, into the dominion of the awful ocean? What vision of grace or grandeur can such a moving St Giles's raise in the mind? What thoughts but those of a culinary nature can the savour of the passengers' beef and cabbage, wafted on shore-while "Sicken'd by the smell, For many a league old ocean frowns,"produce in the most imaginative? It is a pity that our recent improvements upon old inventions should all Ꮪ most universally be unpleasing to the eye, especially since a little attention to outward appearance might have obviated this defect. For instance, in substituting the Semaphor for the Telegraph, it would have been easy to have given its tower and pointed rod a picturesque effect. Crowning the distant hill, and often rising from a mass of woods, it would, if built in the Saxon or Gothic style of architecture, impart to a landscape that peculiar charm with which an appropriate work of man invests the tranquillity of nature. But, as it is, the light fabric of wood, which used to hang its moving panes against the tinted sky, has been ill-exchanged for the stumpy brick column whereby modern dispatches are conveyed from hill to hill. A stage-coach and four horses, spanking along, may not exactly come under the head of the picturesque, but at any rate they are more glorious to behold than a steamcoach with its boiler, if one may be permitted to judge by the engravings of that invention. The poet Wordsworth has likened the smoking horses of a waggon to Apollo in a cloud; but unto what should he liken the smoking tubes of a steam-coach? There has been a whisper of a steamplough. How future commentators will rack their brains over the first stanza of Gray's Elegy in a Churchyard! "The ploughman homeward plods his weary way!" What in the world could that mysterious personage, "the ploughman,' have been? There is, moreover, the Omnibus-but I abstain. Enough has been said to convince the most incredulous that the inevitable hour is on its way, which shall consummate the triumph of Art over Nature, of Deformity over Beauty. Then shall the horse, becoming useless, betake himself to the forests. I forget myself, we have no forests. Cranbourne Chase (the last true forest) is disfranchised; and as the deer there have been wantonly slaughtered, and sold for five shillings a-head, so shall our horses be all put to death as cumber-grounds, and broiled down for dog's meat. Then shall every relic of antiquity utterly disappear. Our cathedrals will mend the roads, and our ancient buildings help to erect snug villas. Then shall every road be laid bare, every hill shall be made low, and all the rough places plain. Every glen shall be Macadam ized, every stream turned into a New River, every lake drained into marshy meadow land. And then shall the Picturesque vanish entirely from the dwellings and scenery of England! To avert so dire a catastrophe, I, Timothy Crusty, Esq., A.M. and F.P.S.propose that Parliament should appoint a select committee, to be called the Board of Taste; (they will be at no loss to find members amongst their own body;)-that this committee should again elect sub-committees in every county of England;-that the functions of these corporate bodies should be,-Imprimis, (as nothing can be done without money,) to raise subscriptions for a fund, and, in the next place, to see that this fund be applied to the following purposes. First, to purchase, standing, such trees as are public ornaments, or conduce to public enjoyment. [It often happens, that a group of trees is as much a feature in a country, as the everlasting rocks themselves. Should not such be preserved, and, by timely planting, perpetuated? There is a law in France, that whoever cuts down one tree, must plant two. As laws that are framed for the public benefit can never be called despotic, I (though a friend to liberty) propose that the Board of Taste should petition Parliament for a similar enactment, and not to mind the stuff about "free-born Englishmen," &c.] In the second place, the Board should buy up such land as is necessary for the preservation of such remains as the giant stones of Avebury. They should also apply a part of the fund to the purchase or repair of fine old buildings, such as the Hall of Altham Palace in Kent, or Tonbridge Castle, which was actually on sale a short time since, They should redeem the towering rocks of Clifton from being trampled under foot, in the shape of turnpike roads. In short, they should cater in every possible way, for the taste and the imagination, as zealously as the board of aldermen provide for the grosser appetites. And each society should have a secretary, as well as treasurer, to report the proceedings of the committee, to convince the sceptical that the funds are properly appropriated, and to publish to an admiring world, the taste, the judgment, the munificence of our Isle. |