Apart from military association, the yew is a tree of gloom, taking the place in British churchyards which the cypress, "like Death's lean lifted forefinger," occupies in Eastern cemeteries. Tennyson was least likely of poets to miss the significance of this tree's melancholy; at first he could recognise in it nothing else but that and its changelessness: Old yew, which graspest at the stones That name the underlying dead, Thy fibres net the dreamless head, Thy roots are wrapt about the bones. Oh not for thee the glow, the bloom, Who changest not in any gale! Nor branding summer suns avail To touch thy thousand years of gloom. Shakespeare received a similar impression: But straight they told me they would bind me here Unto the body of a dismal yew. Sir Walter Scott applied the self-same epithet: But here 'twixt rock and river grew A dismal grove of sable yew. * * * * * Seem'd that the trees their shadows cast The earth that nourished them to blast; For never knew that swarthy grove The verdant hue that fairies love; Nor wilding green, nor woodland flower, Arose within its baleful bower. The dark and sable earth receives Its only carpet from the leaves. [Illustration: FRUIT OF YEW (_Taxus baccata_)] Anyone who has stood on a summer noon within one or other of the two remarkable yew woods on Lord Radnor's property near Salisbury cannot fail to recognise the truth of this picture in every detail. The sense of gloom and envious shade in those "swarthy groves" must oppress him who enters it. They are known respectively as "the Great Yews" and "the Little Yews," the former being of the greater extent--about 80 acres--but the largest trees are growing in the Little Yews. Although these two woods are almost certainly of natural origin, traces of replanting may be recognised here and there by the regular lines in which some of the great trees are disposed, telling of a time when the timber was in request for bow-making. Tennyson came to realise that the yew really responds in its own fashion to the summons of spring as briskly as any rose or lily, and that a sparrow cannot alight upon it in April without disturbing a puff of pollen: Old warder of these buried bones, And answering now my random stroke With fruitful cloud and living smoke, Dark yew, that graspest at the stones And dippest toward the dreamless head, To thee, too, comes the golden hour When flower is feeling after flower. Surely there is nothing more delightful in English verse than the delicate phrase in which Tennyson touches upon some of the less obvious workings of nature.