[2]It is worth noticing how, according to their natures, our English poets have dwelt upon the meaning of the woods, from Spenser, with his allegories, to the ballad-singer, who saw them only as a preserve for deer. Shakspeare touches upon them with both that joyful gladness, peculiar to him, and the deep melancholiness, which they also inspire. Shelley and Keats, though in very different ways, both revel in the woods. To Wordsworth they are “a map of the whole world.” Of course, under the names of woods, and any lessons from them, I speak only of such lowland woods as are known chiefly in England; not dense forests shutting out light and air, without flowers or song of birds, whose effect on national poetry and character is quite the reverse to that of the groves and woodlands of our own England. See what Mr. Ruskin has so well said on the subject. _Modern Painters_, vol. v., part vi., ch. ix., § 15, pp. 89, 90; and, also in the same volume, part vii., chap. iv., § 2, 3, pp. 137-39; and compare vol. iii., part iv., ch. xiv., § 33, pp. 217-19. [3]In the lower part of the Forest, near the Channel, the effect is quite painful, all the trees being strained away from the sea like Tennyson’s thorn. It is the _Usnea barbata_ which covers them, especially the oaks, with its hoary fringe, and gives such a character to the whole Forest. [4]The reader must bear in mind that the word “forest” is here used, as it is always throughout the district, in its primitive sense of a wild, open space. And the moors and plains are still so called, though there may not be a single tree growing upon them. (See chap. iii., p. 35, foot-note.) [5]The woods, in _Domesday_, are, as we shall see, generally valued by the number of swine they maintain.