212

THE ALPINE REGIONS.

than other foliage ; for it casts only a pyramidal slndow.Lowland forest arches overhead, and chequers the ground withdarkness; but the pine, growing in scattered groups, leaves theglades between emerald-bright. Its gloom is all its own; nar-rowing into the sky, it lets the sunshine strike down t> thedew. And if ever a superstitious feeling comes over me amoDgthe pine-glades, it is never tainted with the old German forestfear; but is only a more solemn tone of the fairy enchammentthat haunts our English meadows.”

In the Dolomite region of the Tyrol and in Carinthia thelateral branches of the pine are smaller and altogether semtierthan in the more western examples. Each tree being thus ren-dered more ‘spiky’ in form, the distant woods in these districtshave a markedly ‘horrent’ appearance, which certainly does notadd to their beauty. Messrs Gilbert and Churchill 1 state tint thismode of growth is produced by the practice of cropping the sidebranches to obtain winter fodder for the cattle,—a custom almostas prejudicial to a landscape as the English one of pollardingtrees. I have, however, examined pines high up on the moun-tains, which were certainly much more slender in growth thanthose that I had been accustomed to see further -west, on whichI could not detect any traces of the axe, so that I do n)t feelpersuaded that this explanation wholly accounts for the pecu-liarity. Occasionally also their branches droop, or as we oftencall it, ‘weep’; and the effect of one or two of these weepingpines in a cluster of other trees is very picturesque. Thebranches bend round rather sharply a few inches from the bole,and slope down almost parallel with it, curving slightly upwardsnear the extremity. I passed through a wood of such trees on theeastern side of the Tre Croci pass (Yal Auronzo), some of whichwere veritable giants ; lower down they assumed their usualgrowth. I also noticed that the larches in this neighbourhoodappeared to have their side branches comparatively small

1 The Dolomite Mottiitains, p. 28.