Readers whose habit it is to turn to the last page after a glance at the first will get a misleading impression of Mr. Richter. They will see, with dismay, these words: "That's how life was, death and birth, grub and harvest, rain and clearing, winter and summer. You had to take one with the other, for that's the way it ran." Though there is a slight element in The Trees of the kind of sententious platitudinising this passage suggests, there is much more to it than that. There is research, sincerity, imagination and beauty of writing. It is escape literature of a high-class sort …: that is, it sets the mind free and refreshes it with images and figures from an innocent, half legendary world; a world as far removed from us as if it were another planet, but real all the same, and comforting as rain in...