Next to this double sense of isolation and company was the feeling of
transparent shadow. The forest was thick and cool. Only rarely did the
sun find an orifice in the roof through which to pour a splash of
liquid gold. All the rest was in shadow. But the shadow was that of the
bottom of the sea--cool, green, and, above all, transparent. We saw
into the depth of it, but dimly, as we would see into the green
recesses of a tropic ocean. It possessed the same liquid quality.
Finally the illusion overcame us completely. We bathed in the shadows
as though they were palpable, and from that came great refreshment.
Under foot the soil was springy with the mould of numberless autumns.
The axe had never hurried slow old servant decay. Once in a while we
came across a prostrate trunk lying in the trough of destruction its
fall had occasioned. But the rest of the time we trod a carpet to the
making of which centuries of dead forest warriors had wrapped
themselves in mould and soft moss and gentle dissolution. Sometimes a
faint rounded shell of former fair proportion swelled above the level,
to crumble to punkwood at the lightest touch of our feet. Or, again,
the simulacrum of a tree trunk would bravely oppose our path, only to
melt away into nothing, like the opposing phantoms of Aeneas, when we
placed a knee against it for the surmounting.
If the pine woods be characterized by cathedral solemnity, and the
cedars and tamaracks by certain horrifical gloom, and the popples by a
silvery sunshine, and the berry-clearings by grateful heat and the
homely manner of familiar birds, then the great hardwood must be known
as the dwelling-place of transparent shadows, of cool green lucency,
and the repository of immemorial cheerful forest tradition which the
traveller can hear of, but which he is never permitted actually to
know.
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