The Enchanted Woods Author:Vernon Lee Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: other countries (I count Switzerland and Tyrol as being German) to the haunts of men. In the centre and the south at least the forests actually surround the town... more »s, holding their bit of valley, their fields and meadows, enclosed in their unchanging, evergreen mystery. So that the natural, almost the only, walk is into the forest, which thus becomes associated with all holiday-making, with rest from work and small amusing adventure. It is from the Wald that the bands of citizens and apprentices are returning, with Faust and Wagner behind, escorted by the eerie, circling poodle, through the spring twilight. That scene came vividly home to me, and seemed almost present, one Sunday that I had descended from the old castle : people from the little town were going to and fro the woods, whole families ; and deep in the green depths a lot of well-dressed children were playing shrilly. The woods are the playground, real or imaginary, of the Teuton child—much as the sand and shingle are of the children of other countries ; and, alas ! as gravelled gardens with Punch and Judy are of other children still. They are the scene of escapade of bigger boys, instead of the river to fish in as in England or France, or the hill-side with atrocious fowling-huts in Italy. And have we not all seen the portly, spectacled German burgher, adorned with forest-green braid and little falcon's feather, bringing a woodland quality, an echo of Freischiitz horns, even on to tramcars and into museums ? Let us not laugh—far from it. It merely means that the woods have rooted in the German heart and that they sprout and sough in every line of German poetry and every bar of German music. But it is the essential quality of the German woods not to show traces of this commerce with man. No other places exist so wholly ...« less