Page:The New Forest - its history and its scenery.djvu/27

Rh subdued by their solemn gloom, the imaginative Greek well consecrated each grove and wood to some Divinity. The early Christians fled to "the armour of the house of the Forest," to escape to peace and quietness. Here the old Gothic builders first learnt how to rear their vaulted arches, and to wreathe their pillars with stone arabesques of leaves and flowers, in faint imitation of a beauty they might feel, but never reach.

Consider, too, the loveliness of all tree-forms, from the birch and weeping-willow, which never know the slightest formality, even when in winter barest of leaves, to the oak with its sinewy boughs, strained and tortured as they are in this very Forest, as nowhere else in England, by the Channel winds. Consider,

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