bush to another, there being no opening below large enough to admit a Rabbit. After two hours struggling we had advanced about a mile. [In describing the return journey he adds:] we were properly equipped for the occasion, cloathed in a light canvas frock and trousers, which were mostly torn to atoms before our return, and my shoes, which were strong when I set off, were entirely gone and l was compelled to leave them in the woods.

Though poor Isabella Bird neglects to mention any mosquitoes, she experienced not dissimilar difficulties on her much shorter ’expedition’:

on we went, climbing with difficulty over prostrate firs, or breaking through matted juniper, and still the spring was not, though we were "far away in the woods". But still we climbed on, through swamp and jungle, till we tore our dresses to pieces, and our hats got pulled off in a tree and some of our hair with them;

However, in the end, there is a fundamental difference between the two accounts: Gray was writing his for the owner of the land he was ’exploring’, and so his description of the forests that he passed through, despite his hyperbole, is grounded in reality, such that his descriptions of the various forest—types (the hardwood forest, the spruce swamp and the ash swamp) have a botanical and ecological value:

We took to the woods and for more than a mile found the Land excellent and cloathed with a lovely admixture of lofty Pine, Black Birch, Beech, Maple etc. Advancing we fell in with an extensive Swamp covered with a kind of Spruce fir stunted in its growth, generally not more than 5 or 6 feet high and its branches proceeding horizontally from the ground to the top hard rugged and so interwoven as to render the whole to appearance utterly impervious. [And then comes the hyperbole]: I had never seen the like tho I had explored many hundred miles in the wild and unfrequented Forests of America from St. Augustine to this Island, but more especially in Nova Scotia. Continuing on our journey we came into a Swamp of another kind full of large Ash trees and rendered by the underwoods consisting of Alders, dogwood, maple etc. almost impenetrable these growing in a horizontal direction were so intermingled that we passed generally on their tops and where they happened to be a little thin we sunk frequently to our middle in mud and water. Passing this the woods continued more difficult of access than I had ever seen in other parts of the Island.

However, Isabella Bird’s forest lies entirely in the realm of gothic fantasy, the spring when they at last find it being invested with almost mystical qualities that would not be out of place in The Lord of the Rings:

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[It was] an old, untrodden forest, where generations of trees had rotted away, and strange flowers and lichens grew, and bats flew past us in the artificial darkness; and there were snakes too, ugly spotted things, which hissed at us, and put out their double tongues, and then coiled themselves away in the dim recesses of the forest. at last we reached the spring. It was such a scene as one might have dreamed of in some forest in a fabulous Elysium. It was a large, deep basin of pure white sand, covered with clear water, and seven powerful springs, each about a foot high, rose from it; and trees had fallen over it, and were covered with bright green moss, and others bent over it ready to fall; and above them tall hemlocks shut out the light, except where a few stray beams glittered on the pure transparent water. And here it lay in lonely beauty, as it has done for centuries, probably known only to the old people and to wandering Indians.

This is a fictional forest with little connection with the real forests of the island: we can accept the snake, but the bats are suspect, and the springs — all seven of them (the magical number) shooting a foot into the air! If ever they existed beyond Miss Bird’s lively imagination, they are awaiting a second re-discovery by the good people of St Eleanors!

In the end, it is evident that for both authors the island’s forest primarily served as a useful subject for a literary exercise, and though Gray’s forests are real, what aligns him with the ’Romantic’ is the way that he invested his journey through the forest with an air of adventure and novelty.

The forest as a place for contemplation and self- discovery — For Samuel Hill, the son of John Hill (from 1790 a large—scale proprietor at Cascumpec), who presumably grew up amidst the wilderness forests of the district, the surrounding forest appears to have been a place to visit for its own sake, for, years later in 1839, he tells us that when he was a young man he ”wandered amidst the forests", ‘indulging’, as he put it, his "taste for contemplative enjoyment” which he expressed as follows:

The description of Cascumpec may be thought somewhat more particular than the wild and uncultivated tracts of that district may seem to demand.

. it is the record of a spirit departed from the deep but cheerful solitudes, where it rejoiced in extreme youth, and wandering amidst the forests, dreamed of flourishing towns and peopled villages, which every creek and every grove foretold — a spirit, departed forever from the scenes where, and where only, it ever felt the full pleasure of existence, without weariness and the desire of change.