Author: Mark Coggins

Publisher: Big Earth Publishing

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 9781932557541

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1876 edition. Excerpt: ...life of cities is indescribably grateful. What more refreshing--"in an age where every hour Must sweat its sixty minutes to the death." The park at Knole contains a thousand acres; a noble avenue of trees leads up to the ancient house. "The park is sweet," wrote Walpole, "with much old beech, and an immense sycamore before the great gate which makes me more in love than ever with sycamores." The trees themselves have a cultivated, patrician air, as though their sap was of the bluest; they seem never to have run wild, and to have been always accustomed to the best society; descendants of other ancient trees, having a lineage as unbroken and exclusive as park-palings can make it. There is an old oak--a little to the left of the path, enclosed in railings--that may have sheltered bold barons and knights in the days of the Plantagenets Indeed, all the richly dressed cavaliers and peerless dames whose portraits line the oaken-panelled galleries in yonder stately house, once strutted and ambled beneath the shade of these grand old trees, and talked soft nonsense and court-gossip, the whispered scandal, or the grave state secret. At the end of the long avenue known as the Duchesss Walk stands the "hero-beech." Coleridge in his happiest vein named the birch "the lady of the woods," a term which well befits the delicate grace of that beautiful tree. Mrs. Radcliffe, pursuing the same subject, says, "I should call a beech tree, and this beech above all others, the hero of the forest, as the oak is called the king. It is not now so perfect as we remember it thirty years syne, but it is yet a magnificent tree; carrying its light foliage to a great height, and with a majesty almost sublime....