A Tour in the Forest

FIRST DAY

The sight of the vast pinewood, embracing the whole horizon, the sight
of the 'Forest,' recalls the sight of the ocean. And the sensations it
arouses are the same; the same primaeval untouched force lies
outstretched in its breadth and majesty before the eyes of the
spectator. From the heart of the eternal forest, from the undying bosom
of the waters, comes the same voice: 'I have nothing to do with
thee,'--nature says to man, 'I reign supreme, while do thou bestir
thyself to thy utmost to escape dying.' But the forest is gloomier and
more monotonous than the sea, especially the pine forest, which is
always alike and almost soundless. The ocean menaces and caresses, it
frolics with every colour, speaks with every voice; it reflects the
sky, from which too comes the breath of eternity, but an eternity as it
were not so remote from us.... The dark, unchanging pine-forest keeps
sullen silence or is filled with a dull roar--and at the sight of it
sinks into man's heart more deeply, more irresistibly, the sense of his
own nothingness. It is hard for man, the creature of a day, born
yesterday, and doomed to death on the morrow, it is hard for him to
bear the cold gaze of the eternal Isis, fixed without sympathy upon
him: not only the daring hopes and dreams of youth are humbled and
quenched within him, enfolded by the icy breath of the elements;
no--his whole soul sinks down and swoons within him; he feels that the
last of his kind may vanish off the face of the earth--and not one
needle will quiver on those twigs; he feels his isolation, his
feebleness, his fortuitousness;--and in hurried, secret panic, he turns
to the petty cares and labours of life; he is more at ease in that
world he has himself created; there he is at home, there he dares yet
believe in his own importance and in his own power.

Such were the ideas that came into my mind, some years ago, when,
standing on the steps of a little inn on the bank of the marshy little
river Ressetta, I first gazed upon the forest. The bluish masses of
fir-forest lay in long, continuous ridges before me; here and there was
the green patch of a small birch-copse; the whole sky-line was hugged
by the pine-wood; nowhere was there the white gleam of a church, nor
bright stretches of meadow--it was all trees and trees, everywhere the
ragged edge of the tree-tops, and a delicate dim mist, the eternal mist
of the forest, hung over them in the distance. It was not indolent
repose this immobility of life suggested; no--the absence of life,
something dead, even in its grandeur, was what came to me from every
side of the horizon. I remember big white clouds were swimming by,
slowly and very high up, and the hot summer day lay motionless upon the
silent