When a tract is covered with a dense growth of tall trees, especially of Pines, which have but little underbrush, the wood represents overhead a vast canopy of verdure supported by innumerable lofty pillars.  No one could enter these dark solitudes without feeling a deep impression of sublimity, especially if it be an hour of general stillness of the winds.  The voices of animals and of birds, particularly the hammering of the woodpecker, serve to magnify our perceptions of grandeur.  A very slight sound, during a calm in one of these deep woods, like the ticking of a clock in a vast hall, has a distinctness almost startling, especially if there be but little undergrowth.  These feeble sounds afford one a more vivid sense of the magnitude of the place than louder sounds, that differ less from those we hear in the open plain.  The canopy of foliage overhead and the absence of undergrowth are favorable to those reverberations which are so perceptible in a Pine wood.

In a grove we experience different sensations.  Here pleasantness and cheerfulness are combined, and the feeling of grandeur is excited only perhaps by the sight of some noble tree.  In a grove the trees are generally well formed, many of them being nearly perfect in their proportions.  Their shadows are cast separately upon the ground, which is green beneath them as in an orchard.  If we look upon them from a near eminence, we observe a variety of outlines, and may identify the different species by their shape, while in the forest we see one unbroken mass of foliage.  A wild-wood is frequently converted into a grove by clearing it of undergrowth and leaving the space a grassy lawn.  It may then yield us shade, coolness, and other agreeable sensations of a cultivated wood, but the individual trees always retain their gaunt and imperfect shapes.

The greater part of the woodland of this country partakes of the characters of both forest and grove, exhibiting a pleasant admixture of each, combined with pasture and thicket.  In Great Britain the woods are chiefly groves and parks:  a wild-wood of spontaneous growth is now rare in that country, once renowned for the extent and beauty of its forests.  Most of our American woods are fragments of forest, particularly in the Western States, where they stand out prominently, and deform the landscape by presenting a perpendicular front of naked pillars, unrelieved by any foliage.  They remind one of those houses, in the city, which have been cut asunder to widen a street, leaving the interior rooms and partition-walls exposed to view.  These sections of wood are the grand picturesque deformity of a country lately cleared.  In the older settlements, a recent growth of wood has in many instances come up outside of these palisades, serving in a measure to conceal their baldness.