Monsieur Lesseps, of Suez Canal fame, is reported to have said that Marlborough Forest was the finest he had seen in Europe. Certainly no one who had not seen it would believe that a forest still existed in the very heart of Southern England so completely recalling those woods and 'chases' upon which the ancient feudal monarchs set such store.
The black rooks are busy in the old oak-trees, carrying away the brown acorns one by one in their strong beaks to some open place where, undisturbed, they can feast upon the fruit. The nuts have fallen from the boughs, and the mice garner them out of the ditches; but the blue-black sloes cling tight to the thorn-branch still. The first frost has withered up the weak sap left in the leaves, and they whirl away in yellow clouds before the gusts of wind. It is the season, the hour of half-sorrowful, half-mystic thought, when the past becomes a reality and the present a dream, and unbidden memories of sunny days and sunny faces, seen when life was all spring, float around:
Dim dream-like forms! your shadowy train Around me gathers once again; The same as in life's morning hour, Before my troubled gaze you passed. * * * * * Forms known in happy days you bring, And much-loved shades amid you spring, Like a tradition, half expired, Worn out with many a passing year.
In so busy a land as ours there is no place where the mind can, as it were, turn in upon itself so fully as in the silence and solitude of a village church.
There is no ponderous vastness, no oppressive weight of gloomy roof, no weird cavernous crypts, as in the cathedral; only a _visible_ silence, which at once isolates the soul, separates it from external present influences, and compels it, in falling back upon itself, to recognize its own depth and powers. In daily life we sit as in a vast library filled with tomes, hurriedly writing frivolous letters upon 'vexatious nothings,' snatching our food and slumber, for ever rushing forward with beating pulse, never able to turn our gaze away from the goal to examine the great storehouse, the library around us. Upon the infinitely delicate organization of the brain innumerable pictures are hourly painted; these, too, we hurry by, ignoring them, pushing them back into oblivion. But here, in silence, they pass again before the gaze. Let no man know for what real purpose we come here; tell the aged clerk our business is with brasses and inscriptions, press half a crown into his hand, and let him pass to his potato-digging. There is one advantage at least in the closing of the church on week-days, so much complained of--to those who do visit it there is a certainty that their thoughts will not be disturbed. And the sense of man's presence has departed from the walls and oaken seats; the dust here is not the dust of the highway, of the quick footstep; it is the dust of the past. The ancient heavy key creaks in the cumbrous lock, and the iron latch-ring has worn a deep groove in the solid stone. The narrow nail-studded door of black oak yields slowly to the push--it is not easy to enter, not easy to quit the present--but once close it, and the living world is gone. The very style of ornament upon the door, the broad-headed nails, has come down from the remotest antiquity. After the battle, says the rude bard in the Saxon chronicle,