from the
forest their inhabitants have grown to be. One sees, of late, much more
green in our large German cities; walks on the ramparts and municipal
parks and public gardens have been laid out; open squares, too, have
been decorated with grass plots, bushes and flowers. In no former age
has the art of gardening done so much to enhance the picturesque charm
of our cities as at the present day. I do not by any means wish to
underestimate the high value of such public grounds, but they are
something entirely different from the free forest; they cannot possibly
form any equivalent for it, and the forest unhappily withdraws farther
and farther away from the city. Art and nature have both an equally just
claim upon us; but art can never make up to us for the loss of nature,
not even though it were an art which takes nature itself as the material
upon which to work, like the art of gardening.

The free forest and the free ocean have, with profound significance,
been called by poetry the _sacred_ forest and the _sacred_ ocean, and
nowhere does this sacredness of virgin nature produce a more intense
effect than when the forest rises directly out of the sea. The real,
sacred forest is where the roar of the breaking waves mingles with the
rustling of the tree-tops in one loud hymn; but it is also where, in the
hushed mid-day silence of the German mountain forests, the wanderer,
miles away from every human habitation, hears nothing but the beating of
his own heart in the church-like stillness of the wilderness.

Yet even in the free, sacred forest we find same splendid examples of
the humor of the police. On the Island of Ruegen, when one enters what is
celebrated throughout northern Germany as a sort of primeval
beech-forest of the Granitz,[12] from the trunk of a huge tree a
sign-board meets the wanderer's gaze, bearing an inscription stating
that in this forest one may go about only if accompanied by a
forest-keeper of His Highness, the Prince of Putbus, at five silver
groschen the hour. To enjoy the awe of a primeval forest in the company
of a member of the forest-police, at five silver groschen the hour--that
only a born Berliner is capable of!

It is owing to a strange confusion of ideas that many people consider
the uprooting of the forests in the Germany of the nineteenth century to
be still a reclaiming of the soil, an act of inner colonization, by
means of which the uprooted piece of ground is for the first time give