every one who
cares about the woods. "The English Forest," says Gilpin, "is commonly
composed of woodland views, interspersed with extensive heaths and
lawns. Its trees are oak and beech, whose lively green corresponds
better than the gloomy pine with the nature of the scene, which seldom
assumes the dignity of a mountain one, but generally exhibits a cheerful
landscape. It aspires, indeed, to grandeur; but its grandeur does not
depend, like that of the Scottish forest, on the sublimity of the
objects, but on the vastness of the whole--the extent of its woods and
the wideness of its plains. In its inhabitants also the English forest
differs from the Scottish; instead of the stag and the roebuck, it is
frequented by cattle and fallow-deer, and exchanges the scream of the
eagle and the falcon for the crowing of pheasants, and the melody of the
nightingale. The Scottish forest, no doubt, is the sublimer scene, and
speaks to the imagination in a loftier language than the English forest
can reach. The latter, indeed, often rouses the imagination, but seldom
in so great a degree, being generally content with captivating the eye.
The scenery, too, of the Scottish forest is better calculated to last
through ages than that of the English. The woods of both are almost
destroyed. But while the English forest hath lost all its beauty with
its oaks, and becomes only a desolate waste, the rocks and the
mountains, the lakes and the torrents of the Scottish forest make it
still an interesting scene."

The Tree of the Highlands is the Pine. There are Scotch firs, indeed,
well worth looking at, in the Lowlands, and in England, but to learn
their true character you must see them in the glen, among rooks, by the
river-side and on the mountain. "We for our parts," says Lauder very
finely, "confess that when we have seen it towering in full majesty in
the midst of some appropriate Highland scene, and sending its limbs
abroad with all the unrestrained freedom of a hardy mountaineer, as if
it claimed dominion over the savage region round it, we have looked upon
it as a very sublime object. People who have not seen it in its native
climate and soil, and who judge of it from the wretched abortions which
are swaddled and suffocated in English plantations, among dark, heavy,
and eternally wet clays, may well call it a wretched tree; but when its
foot is among its own Highland heather, and when it stands freely in
its native knoll of dry gravel, or