The country would have been wanting in subjects such as Creswick, with faithful expressions of foliage and knowledge of the play of light and shade, has depicted. It would have lost the text-work of those characteristics Constable revelled in, and those Harding gave us in his oaks. We should have lost subjects for the poet as well as for the painter; for the ballad literature of the country is redolent of sights and sounds associated therewith. To come down from the earliest times. How the old Druids reverenced them! how the compilers of that surprising survey of the country we find in Domesday noted all details concerning them! what joyous allusions Chaucer, Spenser, and later writers make to them! what peculiar charms the “merry green-wood” and the deep forest glades had for the imagination of the people! Hence the popular sympathy expressed by means of tales and traditions in connection with Sherwood’s sylvan shade, and the many editions of the song of the bold outlaw, and of the adventures contained therein. Even the utilitarian philosopher and the ultra radical, fleeing from the stifling atmosphere of the town, and diving for an hour or so into some paternal wood, is inclined, we fancy, to sponge from his memory the bitter things he has said of the owners and of that aristocratic class who usually value and guard them as they do their picture galleries. Thanks to such as these, there is now scarcely a run in the Willey country but brings the sportsman face to face with vestiges of some sylvan memorial Nature or man has planted along the hill and valley sides, memorials renewed again and again, as winter after winter rends the red leaves from the trees: and the man who has not made a pilgrimage, for sport or otherwise, through these far-reaching sylvan slopes along the valley of the Severn, stretching almost uninterruptedly for seven or eight miles, or through some similar wooded tract, witnessing the sheltered inequalities of the surface, varied by rocky glens and rushy pools—the winter haunt of snipe and woodcock—has missed much that might afford him the highest interest. Here and there, on indurated soils along the valley sides, opportunities occur of studying the manner in which trees of several centuries’ growth send their gnarled and massive roots in between the rocks in search of nourishment, for firmness, or to resist storms that shake branches little inferior to the parent stem. Few places probably have finer old hollies and yew-trees indigenous to the soil, relieving the monotony of the general grey by their sombre green—trees rooted where they grew six or eight centuries since, and carrying back the mind to the time of Harold and the bowmen days of Robin Hood. [Picture: Forest scenery]