...of trees

The air was soft and dead, as if all the world were slowly dying. Grey and clammy and silent, even from the shuffling of the collieries, for the pits were working short time, and today stopped altogether. The end of all things!
In the woods all was utterly inert and motionless, only great drops fell from the bare boughs, with a hollow little crash. For the rest, among the old tress was depth within depth of grey, hopeless inertia, silence, nothingness.
Connie walked dimly on. From the old wood came an ancient melancholy, somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insentience of the outer world. She liked the inwardness of the remnant forest, the unspeaking reticence of the old trees. They seemed a very power of silence, and yet a vital presence. They, too, were waiting: obstinately, stoically waiting, and giving off a potency of silence. Perhaps they were only waiting for the end; to be cut down, cleared away, the end of the forest, for them the end of all things. But perhaps their strong aristocratic silence, the silence of strong trees, meant something else.

[Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence, D. H.]