while others, broken by the violence of the gales, lift up their
split and fractured trunks in a thousand shapes of resistance and of
destruction, or still display some knotted and tortuous branches,
stretched out, in sturdy and fantastic forms of defiance, to the
whirlwind and the winter. Noble trunks also, which had long resisted,
but resisted in vain, strew the ground; some lying on the declivity
where they have fallen, others still adhering to the precipice where
they were rooted, many upturned, with their twisted and entangled roots
high in air; while not a few astonish us by the space which they cover,
and by dimensions which we could not otherwise have estimated. It is one
wide image of death, as if the angel of destruction had passed over the
valley. The sight even of a felled tree is painful; still more is that
of the fallen forest, with all its green branches on the ground,
withering, silent, and at rest, where once they glittered in the dew and
the sun, and trembled in the breeze. Yet this is but an image of
vegetable death. It is familiar, and the impression passes away. It is
the naked skeleton bleaching in the winds, the gigantic bones of the
forest still erect, the speaking records of former life, and of strength
still unsubdued, vigorous even in death, which renders Glenmore one
enormous charnel-house."

What happened of old to the aboriginal Forests of Scotland, that long
before these later destructions they had almost all perished, leaving,
to bear witness what they were, such survivors? They were chiefly
destroyed by fire. What power could extinguish chance-kindled
conflagrations, when sailing before the wind? And no doubt fire was set
to clear the country at once of Scotch firs, wolves, wild-boars, and
outlaws. Tradition yet tells of such burnings; and, if we mistake not,
the pines found in the Scottish mosses, the logs and the stocks, all
show that they were destroyed by Vulcan, though Neptune buried them in
the quagmires. Storms no doubt often levelled them by thousands; but had
millions so fallen they had never been missed, and one Element
only--which has been often fearfully commissioned--could achieve the
work. In our own day the axe has indeed done wonders--and sixteen square
miles of the Forest of Rothiemurchus "went to the ground." John of
Ghent, Gilpin tells us, to avenge an inroad, set twenty-four thousand
axes at work in the Caledonian Forest.

Yet Scotland has perhaps sufficient forests