preserved than elsewhere.* Their singularity, | riod. Many of its characteristics-its dignity, and their beauty, as set forth by the gold especially, and its strength-are, among the and rich colours of the brocade, seem to have trees of Europe, most conspicuous in the oak. greatly struck the Roman and Franco-Roman It is true, indeed, that at the very remote artists of Gaul. They copied them in the period, certainly more than 4000 years ago, sculpture of their churches; and according to when the first bands of Aryan wanderers some of the most eminent French antiquaries, reached the shores of Europe, much of the the mystical tree of Assyria between its guar- soil of this continent was covered with forests dian lions is represented on the tympana of composed exclusively of fir-trees, which were many church portals of various dates, but all replaced, first by a vegetation of oaks, and of early character. The form of the tree afterwards by one of beech trees. The occurvaries; and the lions are sometimes replaced rence of such a series of changes in Denmark by dragons or winged monsters. But there has been proved by Sir Charles Lyell, in his is always sufficient resemblance to trace the recent volume, and is remarkably borne out by general design; and it is not perhaps impos- certain changes of signification in the most ansible that some of the grotesque carvings on cient Aryan names for the fir and the oak.* churches built in England during the early The pine forests of that primæval period may Norman period may have had a similar origin. well have been solemn and gigantic, worthy The subject is at least a curious one, and de- fosterers of the religion and the imagination serves a careful examination at the hands of that were bursting into life beneath their roof archæologists. of shade. But if they were the earliest Western representatives of the king of trees, the attributes which were first assigned to them passed afterwards to the oak, and finally rested there. It is the oak which, like the cedar in the East, is the representative of supernatural strength and power. Quercus Jovi placuit.' Everywhere the oak-which, like the cedar, attracts the lightning, and is frequently splin tered by it-is the tree of the Thunder God. The oaks of Zeus belted his oracle at Dodona. In the North, the oak was under the special protection of Donar or Thor, the hammerwielding God whose name is still retained in the word 'thunder.' With the exception, perhaps, of the ash, there is no European tree which can at all compete with the oak either in the extent of veneration which has been assigned to it, or in the dignity of its ancient traditions. Between the oak and the ash, indeed-both 'patricians' of the greenwood,a species of rivalry for the pre-eminence has been maintained from a very early period to the present, when, if more serious omens are no longer afforded by them, it is still possible, say the learned in weather signs, to predict much from the tree which first unfolds her leaves : The third of these most ancient sacred trees the pine or cedar-is of a different type, and represents a distinct class of ideas. The lightest and most graceful of the fir tribe have a certain character of strength and endurance; and the pines which cover the highlands of Upper Assyria and of Persia, though they nowhere attain to the gigantic dimensions of the Himalayan deodars, must have contrasted strongly with the date-palms and tamarisks that form the principal growth of the alluvial district. The whole tribe, in effect, possesses something of the character which attains its highest developement in those venerable cedars of Lebanon, which are perhaps the most solemnly impressive trees in the world. The leaves of the date-palm were represented in Europe by the light catkins' of the willow, still frequently called 'palms,' as in the monastic verse 'Albescit palmæ coma; ramus ejus osanna Audit, Christicola vociferante viro;' but this was a substitution of medieval times, when some representative of the Eastern tree was required for the churchyard processions of Palm Sunday; and the golden willow buds offered themselves at precisely the right sea son. It is possible that the cedar had its Western representative at a much earlier pe 'The Anglo-Saxon furh means fir, and so does Latin, namely quercus (changed in analogy to five the German föhre. But the same word, as fixed in and quinque), means oak, and so does the old word fereha, which occurs in the Laws of Rothar. . . . . The Ayrian tribes, all speaking dialects of the same language, who came to settle in Europe during the Fir period,- -8 period nearly coinciding with the Stone age, would naturally have known the fir tree only, and applied to it the word which in Anglo-Saxon is pronounced as furh, in German as föhre. The Romans settling in Europe during the Gak period would apply the same word to the oak.' Report of Professor Max Muller's Fifth Lecture on the Science of Language, in the 'Saturday Review,' April 25, 1863. 'If the oak's before the ash, The oak, however, may fairly claim precedence here, not only as having been the great tree of Britain in its earliest days, but as affording in its own old age a more venerable image of antiquity than any one of its forest brethren. There is, perhaps, nothing in the world-not even the worm-eaten castle hold under whose walls it may standthat more completely carries back the mind to long past ages than such an oak tree, gnarled, shattered, and storm-beaten; the sward about its roots strewn with hoary frag. ments, brought down by strong winds and wintry snows; yet still wearing its crown of green leaves, and still, year after year, dropping its acorns among the fern at its feet. Such are the grand old oaks of Cadzow Forest, 'Whose limbs a thousand years have worne,' relics of the forest under the shade of whose melancholy boughs, says the tradition, Merlin dwelt and prophesied. Wandering at dusk among the tower-like trunks of these trees, that are scattered irregularly over a space of level ground, surrounded on all sides by the deeper wood, from which the white oxen occasionally emerge into the twilight, it is the present, far more than the past, that becomes dim and spectral; and if the ancient Merlin, with his grey beard and his enchant er's staff, were on such an occasion to present himself, we should scarcely feel much more than the very gentlest shock of mild surprise. Still more suggestive than the oaks of Cadzow-though no doubt owing to their very peculiar character, and to their far wilder situation are those of Wistman's Wood, on Dartmoor, where, according to the saying of the moormen, you may see a thousand oaks a thousand feet high.' The marvel is explained by the size of the trees, which, it is said, do not average more than a single foot in height. But the wood is singular enough without this exaggeration. It hangs on the side of a steep hill above the valley of the West Dart, covered, like most of the Dartmoor hill sides, with a wild ruin of granite blocks and fragments, between which the trees have found their scanty nourishment. It is partly owing to this want of soil, and still more, perhaps, to the mountainous character of the district, that not one of the trees exceeds the height of a tall man. Yet all display the most striking indications of very great age. Their limbs, knotted and contorted into the most fantastic shapes, spread themselves above and between the blocks of gra VOL. CXIV. L-8 nite, many of which rise higher than the trees. 6 We are here not carried beyond the traditions of our English ancestors; but there is no reason why the oaks of Dartmoor should not-some, perhaps, even of those which now exist-have been venerated in earlier days, when the Britons, who have left their traces on almost every hill-side, were undisputed masters of the district. One of the very few certainties about the Druids is their reverence for the oak, and for the mistletoe which grew on it; and a more remarkable group of their sacred trees than they may have found at Wistman's Wood can hardly be imagined. The mistletoe, it is true, no longer grows on them; but it is not in Devonshire only that the mistletoe has deserted the oak. It is now found so rarely on that tree as to have led to the suggestion that we must look for the true misltetoe of the Druids, not in the Viscum album of our own woods and orchards, but in the Loranthus Europaus, an allied parasite, which is frequently found growing on oaks in the South of Europe. The sprays of the Loranthus are longer and its leaves wider than those of our own species, and it is therefore more conspicuous. But although we may allow that the golden bough― 'Aureus et foliis et lento vimine ramus Junoni infernæ dictus sacer the venerabile donum' which admitted Eneas to the wonders of the under-world, may have been a tuft of Loranthus, the 'Marentakken' or 'branch of spectres,' which still in Holstein is believed to confer the powers of ghost-seeing on its possessor, is unquestionably the true Viscum-the same which hangs in such thick clusters, and so appropri- | by mediaval sculptors, when, during the soately, in all the orchards about Glastonbury- called 'Decorated' period, they reproduced that famous Isle of Avalon, which was very leaf and flower with such exquisite beauty and possibly a stronghold of Druidism, and which, fidelity-witness the oak-leaves laid into the according to the ancient tradition, contained panels of the Cantelupe shrine at Hereford, the tomb of the great British hero King or the twisted sprays of oak, clustered with Arthur. There is no proof that the Loran- acorns, which form one of the most graceful thus ever grew farther north than at present; corbels in the choir of Exeter Cathedral. Nor and, on the other hand, the mistletoe figures was the reverence with which the oak was in the traditions of the Northern nations as regarded by any means confined to the Celts. well as in those of the Celts. It was a branch The tree, as we have seen, was dedicated in of mistletoe which killed Baldur, the whitest' an especial manner to Thor. St. Boniface, and best of the Gods, after Freyja had taken who, in his native Devonshire, must have an oath of all created things that they would been well acquainted with the heathen supernever hurt him: except one little shoot that stitions that were still in full force about the groweth east of Valhall, so small and feeble sacred trees and well-springs, waged a sharp that she forgot to take its oath.' But the war against them during his wanderings in mistletoe, thus forgotten, was put by Loke Central Germany. There was a 'Thor's oak' the destroyer into the hand of the blind of enormous size in the country of the HesHodr, who flung it at Baldur when all the sians, greatly reverenced by the people, gods were amusing themselves by pelting him which, following the advice of some of the with the various creatures which had sworn Christian converts, St. Boniface determined to Freyja; and Baldur fell dead, pierced by the to cut down. Accordingly, mentus constan 'feeble' branch. More than one sword of a tia confortatus,' he began to hew at the gi Northern champion was named Mistilteinn,' gantic trunk, whilst the 'heathen folk' stood after the weapon which had slain the white round about, prodigal of their curses, but god. The story affords one of many points not daring to interfere. The tree had not of resemblance between the mythology of been half cut through, when, says Willibrord Northern Europe and those of Persia and the the biographer of Boniface, who was himself farther East. In the Shah Namêh the hero present, a supernatural wind shook the great Asfendiar is represented as invulnerable ex- crown of its branches, and it fell with a cept by a branch from a tree growing on the mighty crash, divided quasi superni nutus remotest shore of the ocean. Desthân, his solatio' into four equal parts. The heathens, enemy, found it, hardened it with fire, and he continues, recognised the miracle, and killed the hero. Both legends possibly refer most of them were converted on the spot. to the 'death' of the sun; perishing in his With the wood of the fallen tree, St. Boniyouthful vigour either at the end of a day, face built an oratory, which he dedicated in struck by the powers of darkness, or at the honour of St. Peter.* end of the sunny season, stung by the thorn of winter.'* It seems something like a caprice which has excluded the mistletoe as well from the evergreen decorations of our churches at present, as from their ancient sculpture and carvings. We know of one instance only of its occurrence. Sprays of mistletoe, with leaf and berry, fill the spandrels of one of the very remarkable tombs in Bristol Cathedral, which were probably designed by some artist-monk in the household of the Berkeleys, whose castle and broad lands are among the chief glories of the West Country, in which the mistletoe is now for the most part found. We do not remember to have seen it elsewhere, even lurking among the quaint devices of a Miserere; whilst the oak-every portion of which, in the days of Celtic heathenism, was almost as sacred as the mistletoe which grew on it--was one of the principal trees' studied' * Max Müller; Comparative Mythology,' in Oxford Essays for 1856. The destruction of the great Thor's oak was by no means an unwise step. The numerous decrees and canons set forth in various councils, and mentioned in different penitentials, as late as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, against such as practised witchcraft and did heathen ceremonies under great trees and in forests, prove how difficult it was to separate the ancient creed from such living memorials of it. Nor does the case seem to have been greatly improved when, as frequently occurred among the Celts, especially in Ireland and Armorica, the tree was reappropriated by the great saint of the district. The Irish St. Colman presided over a famous oaktree, any fragment of which, kept in the mouth, effectually warded off death by hanging--an immunity not to be despised in the land of shillelaghs. When St. Columba's oak at Kenmare was blown down in a storm, no one dared to touch it, or to apply its wood to ordinary purposes, except a certain tanner, *Life by Willibrord, ch. 8. who cured his leather with the bark. With the leather he made himself a pair of shoes, but the first time he put thein on he was struck with leprosy, and remained a leper all his life. The trees of saints might nowhere be profaned with impunity. In the cloister at Vreto, in Brittany, was a yew-tree which had sprung from the staff of St. Martin-not the great saint of Tours, but the first abbot of the Armorican monastery. Under its shadow the Breton princes always prayed before entering the church. No one dared to touch a leaf, and even the birds treated the sweet, scarlet berries with respect. Not so a band of Norman pirates, two of whom climbed St. Martin's tree to cut bow-staves from it. Both, of course, fell, and were killed on the spot. of our ancestors. It is possible that many of the more famous oak trees yet standing in England may date from the days of, at least, Saxon heathendom, and, like the trees of the Irish saints, may have been reappropriated after the conversion About some of them ancient superstitions yet linger; and nearly all are boundary-trees, marking the original limit of shire or of manor. Such was the great 'Shire oak,' which stood at the meeting-place of York, Nottingham, and Derby, into which three counties it extended its vast shadow. Wider spreading than the chestnut of the Centi Cavalli' on Mount Etna, the branches of the Shire-oak could afford shelter to 230 horsemen. Such, too, is the 'Crouch oak at Addlestone, in Surrey, under which Wickliffe preached and Queen Elizabeth dined-one of the ancient border-marks of Windsor Forest, whose name, according to Mr. Kemble, refers to the figure of the cross anciently cut upon it. Trees thus marked are constantly referred to as boundaries in Anglo-Saxon charters. The cross withdrew the oak from the dominion of Thor and Odin, and not only afforded help and protection to human beings, but even to some tribes of the elfin world. Such, at least, was the belief in the old land of the Teutons. As a peasant named Hans Krepel was one day at work on a heath near Salsburg, a little wild or mosswifekin' appeared to him at noontide, and begged that when he left his labour he would cut three crosses on the last tree he felled. to allow them to worry us, unless we can reach a tree with a cross on it. From thence they have no power to move us.' The man answered churlishly, 'Of what use can that be? how can the crosses help you? I shall do no such thing to please you, indeed.' Upon this the wifekin' flew upon him, and squeezed him so hard that he became ill after it; though,' says Prætorius, who tells the story, he was a stout fellow."* In England it was thought that the oaks themselves were mysteriously protected. According to a belief fully maintained by the gossiping Aubrey, and half-endorsed by Evelyn, in his Sylva'— 'A strange noise proceeds from a falling oak, so loud as to be heard at half a mile distant, as if it were the genius of the oak lamenting. 'It has not been unusually observed, continues Aubrey, 'that to cut oakwood is unfortunate. There was at Norwood one oak that had misseltoe, a timber tree, which was felled about 1657. Some persons cut this misseltoe for some apothecaries in London, and sold them a quantity for ten shillings each time, and left only one branch remaining for more to sprout out. One fell laine shortly after; soon after, each of the others lost an eye; and he that felled the tree, though warned of these misfortunes of the other men, would, notwithstanding, adventure to do it, and shortly atter broke his leg; as if the Hamadryades had resolved to take an ample revenge for the injury done to their sacred and venerable oak. I cannot cmit here taking notice of the great misfortunes in the family of the Earl of Winchelsea, who, at Eastwell, in Kent, felled down a most curious grove of oaks, near his own noble seat, and gave the first blow with his own hands. Shortly after, his Countess died in her bed suddenly; and his eldest son, Lord Maidstone, was killed at sea by a cannon-bullet.'t Various omens were afforded by the oak; the change of its leaves from their usual colour gave more than once, says Evelyn, fatal premonition' of coming misfortunes during the great civil war. It was the suiacheantas or badge' of the Stuarts, and the Highlanders looked upon its not being an evergreen as an omen of the fate of the Royal house. Yet the oak was a thoroughbred Cavalier, as befitted the king of the forest 'Wherein the younger Charles abode Till all the paths were dim, He forgot to do so. The next day she apAnd far below the Roundhead rode, peared again, saying, Ah, my man, why did And hummed a surly hymn.' you not cut the three crosses yesterday? It would have been of use to me and to you. No oak-cutter's misfortunes will, it is to be In the evening and at night we are often hoped, fall upon us, because the 29th of May hunted by the wild huntsmen, and are obliged now celebrates with such curtailed ceremony Magnus O'Donnell, Life of St. Columba, ap. Colgan, A. S. Hibern. ii. Vita S. Martini, ap. Mabillon, Acta S.S. Ord. Bened. i. p. 871. *Prætorius, Anthropodemus Plutonicus; Magdeburg, 1666: quoted in Price's Preface to Warton, p. 38. See also Grimm, D. Mythol., p. 881. Aubrey's History of Surrey. that 'sacred oak,' which, says Evelyn, in the dedication of his 'Sylva' to King Charles, 'you, our sós úhazis-Nemorensis Rexonce consecrated with your presence, making it your temple and court too.' vapours that float perpetually over the surface of the earth.* But whilst it is sufficiently clear that the tree is a symbol of the uni verse, its various accompaniments are by no means easy of interpretation. In the whole, the doomed character of the Northern religion-reflecting the sombre skies and the deep, gloomy forests under which it was born and nurtured-is strongly apparent. The tree suffers innumerable evils; the whole creation groans together' until its final renovation, after the twilight of the gods' and the great fire of Surtr. Yggdrasil (the etymology is so obscure that we will not attempt to explain it) suggests in effect far higher realities than it was meant to symbolise; and we can with difficulty escape the conviction that some of its imagery may have been borrowed from the stores of the remoter East. It can hardly have been the mere beauty of the ash which induced our Scandinavian forefathers to adopt it as their mysterious world-tree, graceful and striking as it is, standing sentinel on the outskirts of the Thus the stroke of St. Boniface's axe, although it overthrew Thor, and sent the parting genius with sighing from his tree, could not altogether destroy the recollections and superstitions of the ancient creed. Still less have they faded from the other great sacred tree of Northern Europe, the ash. As with the oak, there are traces of an ancient reverence for the ash among Celts as well as Teutons. But the tree is more especially the property of the Scandinavian races. With them the great ash tree, Yggdrasil, represented the universe. It was the tree of the world, which rose, evergreen, and all glittering with dew above the hall of the triple Norns-Urdr, Verdandr, and Skuldr-the past, present, and future. Under its three roots were the cold land of Hela, the place of torture; the land of Hrim-thyrs, or frost giants; and middle earth, the land of mortal men. An eagle, far-seeing and much ken-wood, or overhanging some broken riverning,' with a hawk perched between his eyes, sits on the top of the tree; and Ratatosk, the squirrel, runs up and down the branches, carrying the words of the eagle to Nidhoegg, the worm of the abyss, who lies coiled at the foot. The Norns daily pour water over the tree from their mysterious well, and under its shadow the gods sit 'to give dooms.' It is the 'noble' tree-the central,' the ancient' tree-highest and best of all trees; yet, in spite of all its honours, the ash drees a heavier wierd' than men weet of. Four stags are for ever biting at its highest shoots. In its side it is decaying; and more serpents than it is possible to number spread venom through the fibres of its roots. Under it is hidden the horn Giallr, with which Heimdallr, the warder of the gods, shall rouse the world at the last great conflict. At its sound Groans the old tree, And Loke is loosed: Shudders Yggdrasil, The great standing ash.'* bank, the dark lines of its curved branches sprays of |