have been laid out; open squares, too, have been decorated with grass plots, bushes and flowers.  In no former age has the art of gardening done so much to enhance the picturesque charm of our cities as at the present day.  I do not by any means wish to underestimate the high value of such public grounds, but they are something entirely different from the free forest; they cannot possibly form any equivalent for it, and the forest unhappily withdraws farther and farther away from the city.  Art and nature have both an equally just claim upon us; but art can never make up to us for the loss of nature, not even though it were an art which takes nature itself as the material upon which to work, like the art of gardening.

The free forest and the free ocean have, with profound significance, been called by poetry the sacred forest and the sacred ocean, and nowhere does this sacredness of virgin nature produce a more intense effect than when the forest rises directly out of the sea.  The real, sacred forest is where the roar of the breaking waves mingles with the rustling of the tree-tops in one loud hymn; but it is also where, in the hushed mid-day silence of the German mountain forests, the wanderer, miles away from every human habitation, hears nothing but the beating of his own heart in the church-like stillness of the wilderness.

Yet even in the free, sacred forest we find same splendid examples of the humor of the police.  On the Island of Ruegen, when one enters what is celebrated throughout northern Germany as a sort of primeval beech-forest of the Granitz,[12] from the trunk of a huge tree a sign-board meets the wanderer’s gaze, bearing an inscription stating that in this forest one may go about only if accompanied by a forest-keeper of His Highness, the Prince of Putbus, at five silver groschen the hour.  To enjoy the awe of a primeval forest in the company of a member of the forest-police, at five silver groschen the hour—­that only a born Berliner is capable of!

It is owing to a strange confusion of ideas that many people consider the uprooting of the forests in the Germany of the nineteenth century to be still a reclaiming of the soil, an act of inner colonization, by means of which the uprooted piece of ground is for the first time given over to cultivation.  For us the forest is no longer the wilderness out of which we must force our way into cleared land, but it is a veritable magnificent safeguard of our most characteristic national life.  Therefore it was that I called it the wild cultivation of the soil in contrast to the tame cultivation of the field.  In our day, to root out the soil of the forest no longer means making it arable; it simply means exchanging one form of cultivation for another.  He who estimates the value of the culture of the soil merely according to the percentage of clear profit accruing from it, will wish to clear forest-land in order to make it arable.  We, however, do not estimate the various forms of cultivation of the soil only by the standard of their money value, but also by that of their ideal worth.  The fact that our soil is cultivated in so many various ways is one of the chief causes of our wealth of individual social organizations, and therefore of the vitality of our society itself.