Soignies is not legend-haunted like the Black Forest, nor king-haunted
like Fontainebleau, nor sovereign of two historic streams like the brave
woods of Heidelberg; nor wild and romantic, arid broken with black rocks,
and poetized by the shade of Jaques, and swept through by a perfect
river, like its neighbors of Ardennes; nor throned aloft on mighty
mountains like the majestic oak glades of the Swabian hills of the ivory
carvers.
Soignies is only a Flemish forest in a plain, throwing its shadows over
corn-fields and cattle pastures, with no panorama beyond it and no
wonders in its depth. But it is a fresh, bold, beautiful forest for all
that.
It has only green leaves to give,--green leaves always, league after
league; but there is about it that vague mystery which all forests have,
and this universe of leaves seems boundless, and Pan might dwell in it,
and St. Hubert, and John Keats.
Bebee, in her rare holidays with the Bac children or with Jeannot's
sisters, had never penetrated farther than the glades of the Cambre,
and had never entered the heart of the true forest, which is much still
what it must have been in the old days when the burghers of Brabant cut
their yew bows and their pike staves from it to use against the hosts of
Spain.
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