This tract of placid and enchanted woodland, field, brake, glen, and coppice, has always seemed to us so amazingly like the magical Forest of Arden that we believe Shakespeare must have written “As You Like It” somewhere near here.  One visitor, who was here when the woods were whispering blackly in autumn moonlight, thought them akin to George Meredith’s “The Woods of Westermain”—­

Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare. 
Nothing harms beneath the leaves
More than waves a swimmer cleaves,
Toss your heart up with the lark,
Foot at peace with mouse and worm. 
Fair you fare. 
Only at a dread of dark
Quaver, and they quit their form: 
Thousand eyeballs under hoods
Have you by the hair. 
Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.

But in winter, and in such a noonday of clear sunshine as the present, when all the naked grace of trunks and hillsides lies open to eyeshot, the woodland has less of that secrecy and brooding horror that Meredith found in “Westermain.”  It has the very breath of that golden-bathed magic that moved in Shakespeare’s tenderest haunt of comedy.  Momently, looking out toward the gray ruin on the hill (which was once, most likely, the very “sheepcote fenced about with olive trees” where Aliena dwelt and Ganymede found hose and doublet give such pleasing freedom to her limbs and her wit) one expects to hear the merry note of a horn; the moralizing Duke would come striding thoughtfully through the thicket down by the tiny pool (or shall we call it a mere?).  He would sit under those two knotty old oaks and begin to pluck the burrs from his jerkin.  Then would come his cheerful tanned followers, carrying the dappled burgher they had ambushed; and, last, the pensive Jacques (so very like Mr. Joseph Pennell in bearing and humour) distilling his meridian melancholy into pentameter paragraphs, like any colyumist.  A bonfire is quickly kindled, and the hiss and fume of venison collops whiff to us across the blue air.  Against that stump—­is it a real stump, or only a painted canvas affair from the property man’s warehouse?—­surely that is a demijohn of cider?  And we can hear, presently, that most piercingly tremulous of all songs rising in rich chorus, with the plenitude of pathos that masculines best compass after a full meal—­

          Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
          Thou art not so unkind
          As man’s ingratitude—­

We hum the air over to ourself, and are stricken with the most perfect iridescent sorrow.  We even ransack our memory to try to think of someone who has been ungrateful to us, so that we can throw a little vigorous bitterness into our tone.

Yes, the sunshine that gilds our Salamis thickets seems to us to have very much the amber glow of footlights.