Love Among the Ruins by Warwick Deeping

The avenues of the pine forest engulfed the harper and the lady. The myriad crowded trunks hemmed them with a stubborn and impassive gloom. A faint wind moved in the tree-tops. Dim aisles struck into an ever-deepening mystery of shadow, as into the dark mazes of a dream.

The wild was as some primaeval waste, desolate and terrible, a vast flood of sombre green rolling over hill and valley. Its thickets plunged midnight into the bosom of day. On the hills, the trees stood like traceried pinnacles, spears blood-red in the sunset, or splashed with the glittering magic of the moon. There were dells sunk deep beneath crags; choked with dense darkness, unsifted by the sun. Winding alleys white with pebbles as with the bones of the dead, wound through seething seas of gorse. In summer, heather sucked with purple lips at the tapestries of moss blazoning the ground, bronze, green, and gold. It was a wild region, and mysterious, a shadowland moaned over by the voice of a distressful wind.