illustrated the kindly influence of light and air. Even where
the trees were largest the sunshine penetrated, subdued by the
foliage to exquisite greenish-golden tints, filling the wide
lower spaces with tender half-lights, and faint blue-and-gray
shadows. Lying on my back and gazing up, I felt reluctant to
rise and renew my ramble. For what a roof was that above my
head! Roof I call it, just as the poets in their poverty
sometimes describe the infinite ethereal sky by that word; but it
was no more roof-like and hindering to the soaring spirit than
the higher clouds that float in changing forms and tints, and
like the foliage chasten the intolerable noonday beams. How far
above me seemed that leafy cloudland into which I gazed! Nature,
we know, first taught the architect to produce by long colonnades
the illusion of distance; but the light-excluding roof prevents
him from getting the same effect above. Here Nature is
unapproachable with her green, airy canopy, a sun-impregnated
cloud--cloud above cloud; and though the highest may be unreached
by the eye, the beams yet filter through, illuming the wide
spaces beneath--chamber succeeded by chamber, each with its own
special lights and shadows. Far above me, but not nearly so far
as it seemed, the tender gloom of one such chamber or space is
traversed now by a golden shaft of light falling through some
break in the upper foliage, giving a strange glory to everything
it touches--projecting leaves, and beard-like tuft of moss, and
snaky bush-rope. And in the most open part of that most open
space, suspended on nothing to the eye, the shaft reveals a
tangle of shining silver threads--the web of some large
tree-spider. These seemingly distant yet distinctly visible
threads serve to remind me that the human artist is only able to
get his horizontal distance by a monotonous reduplication of