Open groves, fragments of forest, and inferior groups alone are
particularly interesting in landscape. An extensive and unbroken
wilderness of wood affords but a dreary prospect and an unattractive
journey. Its gloomy uniformity tires and saddens the spectator, after
some hours’ confinement to it. The primitive state of any densely wooded
continent, unmodified by the operations of civilized man, is sadly
wanting in those cheerful scenes which are now so common in New England.
Nature must be combined with art, or rather with the works of man’s
labor, and associated with human life, to be deeply interesting. It is
not necessary, however, that the artificial objects in a landscape
should possess a grand historical character to awaken our sympathies.
Humble objects, indeed, are the most consonant with nature’s aspects,
because they manifest no ludicrous endeavor to rival them. A woodman’s
hut in a clearing, a farmer’s cottage on some half-cultivated slope, a
saw-mill, or even a mere sheepfold, awakens a sympathetic interest, and
enlivens the scene with pastoral and romantic images.
A great part of the territory of North America is still a wilderness;
but the forests have been so extensively invaded that we see the
original wood only in fragments, seldom forming unique assemblages.
Especially in the Western States, the woods are chiefly sections of the
forest, scattered in and around the spacious clearings, without many
natural groups of trees to please the eye with their spontaneous beauty.
They surround the clearing with palisades of naked pillars, unrelieved
by any foliage below their summits. They remind me of city houses which
have been cut asunder to widen an avenue, leaving their interior walls
exposed to sight. These fragments of forest, and the acres of stumps in
the recent clearings, are the grand picturesque deformity of the newly
settled parts of the country. But when a wall of these forest palisades,
a hundred feet in height, bounds the plain for miles of prospect, it
forms a scene of unexceptionable grandeur.
It is chiefly in the old States that we see anything like a picturesque
grouping of trees. There the wood assumes the character of both forest
and grove, displaying a beautiful intermixture of them, combined with
groups of coppice and shrubbery. Thickets generally occupy the low
grounds, and coppice the elevations. The New England system of farming
has been more favorable to the picturesque grouping of wood, and other
objects, than that of any other part of the country. At the South, where
agriculture is carried on in large plantations, we see spacious fields
of tillage, and forest groups of corresponding size. But the small,
independent farming of New England has produced a charming variety of
wood, pasture, and tillage, so agreeably intermixed that we are never
weary of looking upon it. The varied surface of the land has increased
these advantages, producing an endless succession of those limited views
which we call picturesque.
When a considerable space is covered with a dense growth of tall trees,
the assemblage represents overhead an immense canopy of verdure,
supported by innumerable pillars. No man could enter one of these dark
solitudes without a deep impression of sublimity, especially during a
general stillness of the winds. The voices of solitary birds, and other
sounds peculiar to the woods, exalt this impression. Indeed, the
grandeur and solemnity of a magnificent wood are hardly surpassed by
anything else in nature. A very slight sound, during a calm, in one of
these deep woods, has a distinctness almost startling, like the ticking
of a clock in a vast hall. These feeble sounds afford us a more vivid
sense of the magnitude of the place, and of its deep solemnity, than
louder sounds, which are attended with a confused reverberation. The
foliage, spread out in a continuous mass over our heads, produces the
effect of a ceiling, and represents the roof of a vast temple.
In an open grove we experience different sensations. Here pleasantness
and cheerfulness are combined, though a sense of grandeur may be excited
by some noble trees. In a grove, the trees in general are well
developed, having room enough to expand to their normal proportions. We
often see their shadows cast separately upon the ground, which is green
beneath them as in an orchard. If we look upon this assemblage from an
adjoining eminence, we observe a variety of outlines by which we may
identify the different species. A wild wood is sometimes converted into
a grove by clearing it of its undergrowth and removing the smaller
trees. Such an assemblage displays but few of the charms of a natural
grove. A cleared wild wood yields shade and coolness; but the individual
trees always retain their gaunt and imperfect shapes.
Artificial plantations display the characters of a grove; but all
spontaneous growths are bordered and more or less interspersed with
underwood. Hence a limited growth of forest, like a wooded island,
surrounded by water or by a meadow, surpasses any artificial plantation
as a picturesque and beautiful feature of landscape. The painter finds
in these spontaneous collections of wood an endless variety of grouping
and outline for the exercise of his art; and the botanist discovers, in
their glens and hollows, hundreds of species that would perish in an
open grove. Some woods are distinguished by a superfluity, others, like
fir and beech woods, by a deficiency of undergrowth, and this differs in
botanical characters as well as in quantity, according to the
predominant species in the wood. In all woods, however, shrubbery is
more abundant on the borders than in the interior. This border-growth
contributes more than anything else to harmonize wood and field. It is
the outside finish and native embellishment of every spontaneous
assemblage of trees.
A wood in a valley between two open hills does not darken the prospect
as if it covered the hills, though, if it be continuous, it hides the
form of the ground. But when it has come up in scattered groups on a
wide plain, without the interference of art, it surpasses every other
description of wood-scenery. An assemblage of trees on a hillside is
called a “hanging wood,” because it seems to overhang the valley beneath
it. Thus situated it forms oppositions of a very striking sort, by
lifting its summits into the sunshine while it deepens the shadows that
rest upon the valley. Wood on steep declivities is an interesting sight,
especially if an occasional opening reveals to us the precipitous
character of the ground, and shows the difficulties which the trees have
overcome in their struggle for life. Some of our pleasure comes from the
evident utility of such a wood. We see at once that a rocky steep could
not be occupied by any other vegetation, except under the protection of
the trees, and that trees alone could resist the force of occasional
torrents; that without them the ground would be barren, ugly, and
profitless, and difficult and dangerous to those who should attempt to
climb it.