July 7, 1891. In the Woods
I cannot tell why it is, but to be alone among woods, especially towards evening, is often attended with a vague unrest, an unsubstantial awe, which, though of the nature of pleasure, is perilously near the confines of horror. On certain days, when the nerves are very alert and the woods unusually still, I have known the sense become almost insupportable. There is a certain feeling of being haunted, followed, watched, almost dogged, which is bewildering and unmanning. Foolish as it may appear, I have found the carrying of a gun almost a relief on such occasions. But what heightens the sense in a strange degree is the presence of still water. A stream is lively—it encourages and consoles; but the sight of a long dark lake, with the woods coming down to the water’s edge, is a sight so solemn as to be positively oppressive. Each kind of natural scenery has its own awe—the genius loci, so to speak. On a grassy down there is the terror of the huge[169] open-eyed gaze of the sky. In craggy mountains there is something wild and beastlike frowning from the rocks. Among ice and snow there is something mercilessly pure and averse to life; but neither of these is so intense or definite as the horror of still woods and silent waters. The feeling is admirably expressed by Mr. George Macdonald in Phantastes, a magical book. It is that sensation of haunting presences hiding behind trees, watching us timidly from the fern, peeping from dark copses, resting among fantastic and weather-worn rocks, that finds expression in the stories of Dryads and fairies, which seem so deeply implanted in the mind of man. Who, on coming out through dark woods into some green sequestered lawn, set deep in the fringing forest, has not had the sensation of an interrupted revel, as festivity suddenly abandoned by wild, ethereal natures, who have shrunk in silent alarm back into the sheltering shades? If only one had been more wary, and stolen a moment earlier upon the unsuspecting company!
But there is a darker and cloudier sensation, the admonitus locorum, which I have experienced upon fields of battle, and places where[170] some huge tragedy of human suffering and excitement has been wrought. I have felt it upon the rustic ploughland of Jena, and on the grassy slopes of Flodden; it has crept over me under the mouldering walls and frowning gateways of old guarded towns; and not only there, where it may be nothing but the reflex of shadowy imaginations, but on wind-swept moors and tranquil valleys, I have felt, by some secret intuition, some overpowering tremor of spirit, that here some desperate strife has been waged, some primeval conflict enacted. There is a spot in the valley of Llanthony, a grassy tumulus among steep green hills, where the sense came over me with an uncontrollable throb of insight, that here some desperate stand was made, some barbarous Themopyl? lost or won.
A Dark Secret
There is a place near Golden End where I encountered a singular experience. I own that I never pass it now without some obsession of feeling; indeed, I will confess that when I am alone I take a considerable circuit to avoid the place. An ancient footway, trodden deep in a sandy covert, winds up through a copse, and comes out into a quiet place far from the high-road, in the heart of the wood.[171] Here stands a mouldering barn, and there are two or three shrubs, an escalonia and a cypress, that testify to some remote human occupation. There is a stretch of green sward, varied with bracken, and on the left a deep excavation, where sand has been dug: in winter, a pool; in summer, a marshy place full of stiff, lush water-plants. In this place, time after time as I passed it, there seemed to be a strange silence. No bird seemed to sing here, no woodland beast to frisk here; a secret shame or horror rested on the spot. It was with no sense of surprise, but rather of resolved doubt, that I found, one bright morning, two labouring men bent over some object that lay upon the ground. When they saw me, they seemed at first to hesitate, and then asked me to come and look. It was a spectacle of singular horror: they had drawn from the marshy edge of the pool the tiny skeleton of a child, wrapped in some oozy a............