frightened notes like a requiem.

Ah! here we are at the very scene of murder, the very tree that they
are felling; they have just hewn round the trunk with those
slaughtering axes, and are about to saw it asunder. After all, it
is a fine and thrilling operation, as the work of death usually is.
Into how grand an attitude was that young man thrown as he gave the
final strokes round the root; and how wonderful is the effect of
that supple and apparently powerless saw, bending like a riband, and
yet overmastering that giant of the woods, conquering and
overthrowing that thing of life! Now it has passed half through the
trunk, and the woodman has begun to calculate which way the tree
will fall; he drives a wedge to direct its course;--now a few more
movements of the noiseless saw; and then a larger wedge. See how
the branches tremble! Hark how the trunk begins to crack! Another
stroke of the huge hammer on the wedge, and the tree quivers, as
with a mortal agony, shakes, reels, and falls. How slow, and
solemn, and awful it is! How like to death, to human death in its
grandest form! Caesar in the Capitol, Seneca in the bath, could not
fall more sublimely than that oak.

Even the heavens seem to sympathise with the devastation. The
clouds have gathered into one thick low canopy, dark and vapoury as
the smoke which overhangs London; the setting sun is just gleaming
underneath with a dim and bloody glare, and the crimson rays
spreading upward with a lurid and portentous grandeur, a subdued and
dusky glow, like the light reflected on the sky from some vast
conflagration. The deep flush fades away, and the rain begins to
descend; and we hurry homeward rapidly, yet sadly, forgetful alike
of the flowers, the hedgehog, and the wetting, thinking and talking