hates
to and fro, in town and country, until the hour of the great dissolvent.

Or, perhaps, you will keep to the cover. For the forest is by itself,
and forest life owns small kinship with life in the dismal land of
labour. Men are so far sophisticated that they cannot take the world as
it is given to them by the sight of their eyes. Not only what they see
and hear, but what they know to be behind, enter into their notion of a
place. If the sea, for instance, lie just across the hills, sea-thoughts
will come to them at intervals, and the tenor of their dreams from time
to time will suffer a sea-change. And so here, in this forest, a
knowledge of its greatness is for much in the effect produced. You
reckon up the miles that lie between you and intrusion. You may walk
before you all day long, and not fear to touch the barrier of your Eden,
or stumble out of fairyland into the land of gin and steam-hammers. And
there is an old tale enhances for the imagination the grandeur of the
woods of France, and secures you in the thought of your seclusion. When
Charles VI. hunted in the time of his wild boyhood near Senlis, there
was captured an old stag, having a collar of bronze about his neck, and
these words engraved on the collar: "Caesar mini hoc donavit." It is no
wonder if the minds of men were moved at this occurrence and they stood
aghast to find themselves thus touching hands with forgotten ages, and
following an antiquity with hound and horn. And even for you, it is
scarcely in an idle curiosity that you ponder how many centuries this
stag had carried its free antlers through the wood, and how many summers
and winters had shone and snowed on the imperial badge. If the extent of
solemn wood could thus safeguard a tall stag from the hunter's hounds
and horses, might not you also play hide-and-seek, in these groves, with
all the pangs and trepidations of man's life, and elude Death, the
mighty hunter, for more than the span of human years? Here, also, crash
his arrows; here, in the farthest glade, sounds the gallop of the pale
horse. But he does not hunt this cover with all his hounds, for the game
is thin and small: and if you were but alert and wary, if you lodged
ever in the deepest thickets, you too might live on into later
generations and astonish men by your stalwart age and the trophies of an
immemorial success.

For the forest takes away from you all excuse to die. There is nothing
here to cabin or thwart your free