CHAPTER IV

THE TREE IN ITS RELATION TO HUMAN LIFE

Having dealt with the Tree in its connection on the one hand with gods, and on the other with spirits of more equivocal attributes, we have now to consider a series of myths and traditions wherein it was regarded as entering into a still more intimate relationship with man. Sometimes it was represented as the source from which the human race originally sprang, sometimes, conversely, as the object into which the soul might retreat after death, or into which an individual might be transmuted, body and soul, by some miraculous agency. In other cases the life of a

## particular tree was held to be bound up with that of an individual or a

community, and lastly, in a still larger conception, the tree came to be very widely regarded as the embodiment of the spirit of fertility, the especial patron of the field and flock.

To the modern mind, which claims to have deciphered Nature’s scattered hieroglyphs, and finds a genealogical document even in the evanescent wrinkles on a baby’s foot, the idea of man taking origin from a tree will seem in the highest degree fantastic, but to the primitive intelligence it probably presented no greater difficulty than the extraction of the new baby from the parsley bed does to the modern child. The early inquirer may well have found in it the most natural answer to the eternal riddle, “Whence came our first parents?” the most plausible solution to the strange problem of man’s separate existence upon the globe, supplying the necessary link between him and the great mother-earth, which supported and fed him while alive, and received him again into her bosom when dead. Speculation apart, however, the solution would appear to have commended itself to many different inquirers, for the belief that the human race took its first origin from trees is met with in the mythology of the most widely separated races.

Thus we read in the Eddas that when heaven and earth had been made, Odin and his brothers walking by the sea-shore came upon two trees. These they changed into human beings, male and female. The first brother gave them soul and life; the second endowed them with wit and will to move; the third added face, speech, sight, and hearing. They clothed them also and chose their names, Ask for the man’s and Embla for the woman’s. And then they sent them forth to be the parents of the human race.[153]

Again, according to the Iranian account of the creation the first human couple, Maschia and Maschiâna, issued from the ground in the form of a rhubarb plant (the _Rheum ribes_), which was at first single, but in process of time became divided into two.[154] Ormuzd imparted to each a human soul, and they became the parents of mankind.

In the corresponding legend current amongst the Sioux of the Upper Missouri[155] one seems to catch an echo from the Garden of Eden. Here the original parents, like the trees from which they developed, at first stood firmly fixed to the earth, until a monster snake gnawed away the roots and gave them independent motion, just as in Paradise the serpent destroyed the harmony and mutual trust which united Adam and Eve.

The classical nations possessed a similar tradition. According to Hesychius it was believed by the Greeks that the human race was the fruit of the ash, and Hesiod relates that it was from the trunks of ash-trees that Zeus created the third or bronze race of men.[156] The oak was particularised as the favoured tree in another tradition. “Whence art thou?” inquires Penelope of the disguised Ulysses, “for thou are not sprung of oak or rock, as old tales tell.”[157] Virgil, too, speaks of

Nymphs, and fauns, and savage men, who took Their birth from trunks of trees and stubborn oak.[158]

The Damaras of South Africa believe that the universal progenitor was a tree, out of which came Damaras, Bushmen, oxen and zebras, and everything else that lives.[159]

In other legends human beings are represented as arising from the tree as its fruit. The first book of the _Mahâbhârata_ tells of an enormous Indian fig-tree from whose branches hung little devotees in human form; and an Italian traveller of the fourteenth century was assured by the natives of Malabar that they knew of trees, which instead of fruit bore pigmy men and women. So long as the wind blew they remained fresh and healthy, but when it dropped they became withered and dry.[160] A somewhat similar tradition was familiar to the Arab geographers, who tell of a talking tree growing at the easternmost point of the habitable world, which bore young women on its branches in place of fruit.[161] And even to the present day folk-tales of Saxony and Thuringia speak of children as “growing on the tree.”

In another class of origin-myths _individual_ births are represented as taking place directly from a tree. Adonis came forth at the stroke of a sword from the tree into which his mother, the guilty Myrrha, had been transformed in answer to her prayers.[162] The Phrygian Attis, according to one version, was fathered by an almond-tree; while, according to another, his body was confined by Cybele in a pine-tree, from which on the return of spring he was born again.[163] The Khatties of Central India claim to be descended from a certain Khat, “begotten of wood,” who, at the prayer of Karna, an illegitimate brother of the five sons of Pându (heroes of the _Mahâbhârata_), sprang from the staff he had fashioned from the branch of a tree to assist him against his legitimate kinsmen.[164]

The above examples prove how widely the conception prevailed that human beings or man-like spirits might owe their first origin to the tree. In a later stage these crude myths were rationalised in three directions. In one the tree came to be, not the source, but the scene of a miraculous birth; in another its supposed connection with a human being was explained by a metamorphosis legend; and, thirdly, the tree came to be regarded as the symbol and minister of fecundity.

Many of the gods of Greece were born or brought up, according to tradition, at the foot of some tree, whence Bötticher argues that their worship was founded on a pre-existing tree-cult. Rhea gave birth to Zeus beneath a poplar in Crete, and the ruins of her temple in an adjoining cypress grove were shown even up to the Augustan age.[165] The people of Tanagra asserted that the young Hermes was reared amongst them under a purslane-tree (_andrachnos_), the remains of which were for long treasured in the temple of the god as a sacred souvenir of the institution of his worship.[166] Hera was born and brought up under a willow in Samos, described by Pausanias, who saw it still in leaf, as the most ancient of the sacred trees known to the Greeks.[167] Leto gave birth to Apollo and Artemis in the island of Delos while clasping two trees, by some authorities particularised as an olive and a palm, by others, under the idea that Apollo must have been born at the foot of his own tree, as two laurels.[168] Romulus and Remus were found under the _Ficus ruminalis_ by the Tiber, and in later days were worshipped in the Comitium beneath a sapling from that tree. The same idea is met with in the mythology of other nations. Vishnu was born beneath the pillared shade of the banian; Buddha was born and died under a sâl-tree.

The converse of these origin myths is represented in the numerous legends of metamorphosis and transmigration. The well-known story of Apollo and Daphne seems to supply an instance of the way in which the metamorphosis story arose to explain a more primitive connection, the meaning of which had been lost. It is an established fact that the laurel was held sacred in Greece as connected with earth-oracles before the worship of Apollo was introduced. A sacred laurel grew by the prophetic cleft at Delphi in the days when the earth-goddess, Gaia, still presided over the oracle, and according to tradition the goddess’ daughter, Daphne, a mountain nymph, was priestess under her.[169] The story which explains the transference of the oracular power from Gaia to Apollo tells how Daphne, fleeing before the god, entreats her mother, Earth, to save her; the ground opens to receive her, and in her place a laurel appears. Apollo, balked of his love, cries: “If thou may’st not be my wife, thou shalt for ever be my tree,” and henceforward he makes the laurel his sanctuary, and crowns his head and his lyre with its leaves. Thus he steps into her mother’s place, and the laws of Zeus—the old earth-oracles under a new name—are proclaimed through him.

The story is one of the many folk-tales concerning the conversion of mortals into trees which Ovid has so gracefully elaborated in his _Metamorphoses_, and which assume a new importance now that we can trace them back into that old world when tree and man, and indeed all living things, were held to be so near akin. How far they owed their origin to the desire to find a new sanction for the traditional tree-worship by investing it with a human interest, it is impossible to say. It is sufficient for us that they demonstrate the survival of very ancient modes of thought amongst races who had otherwise reached a high degree of civilisation. They were amongst the miracles of classical antiquity, and like other miracles, if they prove nothing else, they at least afford invaluable evidence as to the state of mental culture amongst those who found them credible.

One of the most interesting of these metamorphosis legends concerns the fate of the three daughters of the Sun and Clymene, who were so heart-broken at the tragic fate of their brother Phaëton that they were changed into poplars by the banks of the stream into which he had been hurled,—the Eridanus or Po. The tears they shed were preserved in the form of amber:—

As she bent To kneel, Phaëthusa, eldest born, her feet Felt stiffen, and Lampetië, at her cry Starting, took sudden root, and strove in vain For motion to her aid. The third, her hair In anguish tearing, tore off leaves! And now Their legs grow fixed as trunks, their arms as boughs Extend, and upward round them creeps a bark That gradual folds the form entire, save yet The head and mouth, that to their mother shrieks For help. What help is hers to give? Now here, Now there she rushes, frantic, kissing this Or that while yet she can, and strives to rend Their bodies from the clasping bark, and tears The fresh leaves from their sprouting heads, and sees, Aghast, red drops as from some wound distil. And “Ah, forbear!” the sufferer shrieks; “forbear, O mother dear! our bodies in these trees Alone are rent! Farewell!” And o’er the words, Scarce-uttered, closed the bark, and all was still. But yet they weep; and in the sun their tears To amber harden, by the clear stream caught And borne, the gaud and grace of Latian maids.[170]

The story of Baucis and Philemon—the worthy peasants who so hospitably entertained the gods, Zeus and Hermes, disguised as travellers, that their cottage was changed into a temple and they themselves into its priest and priestess—is more familiar. Their prayer that neither should witness the death of the other was fulfilled by the gods, by means of a device familiar enough to the folk-lore of the time:—

As one morn upon the hallowed steps, Bowed now with years, they stood, and to a knot Of wondering hearers told the Temple’s tale, Surprised each saw the other’s figure change And sprout with sudden verdure: and, as round Their forms the rapid foliage spread, while yet They could, one mutual fond “Farewell” they took, One kiss, and o’er their faces closed the bark, And both in trees were hidden! Still the boughs That interlacing link the neighbour trunks Tyana’s peasant loves to show:—the tale Her gravest elders—men not like to lie, As wherefore should they lie?—with serious faith Attested to these ears. The honoured boughs Myself have seen with garlands decked, myself One garland added more.[171]

In many cases metamorphosis legends were attached to particular kinds of trees, thereby no doubt reinforcing the reverence and affection with which they were regarded. The Greek name for the almond tree, “Phylla,” recalled the fate of Phyllis, the beautiful Thracian, who hanged herself in despair when she thought Demophoon had deserted her, and was changed by the gods into one of these trees. Shortly afterwards the truant lover returned, heard the sorrowful tidings, visited the tree, and embraced it with tears. Then suddenly its branches, which till then had remained bare, burst forth into blossom and verdure, as if to show how joyfully conscious they were of the beloved’s return. Melus, priest of Aphrodite, filled with grief at the death of his foster-son Adonis, hanged himself, and was changed by the goddess he served into an apple-tree, from which time forward the apple came to be regarded as the most acceptable gift that a lover could offer at her shrine. Lotis, a beautiful nymph, pursued by Priapus, threw herself on the mercy of the gods, and by them was changed into the lotus-tree.

The pine-tree, into which Cybele, in a moment of anger, had changed her lover and devotee, Attis, owed its perennial verdure to the compassion of Zeus for her remorse. The pomegranate was connected in tradition with a certain maid whom Dionysus loved, and the crown-like form of its blossom was accounted for by the story that the god, before he changed her into a tree, had promised her that she should one day wear a crown. The frankincense-tree owed its virtue to the nectar and ambrosia scattered by Apollo on the tomb of Leucothea, who had secured his love, and in consequence had been buried alive at the instance of her rival, Clytia. The tree grew from her grave, and Clytia, pining away in turn from grief, was changed into a plant whose blossoms were destined henceforth, like our sunflower, perpetually to confront the sun, her faithless lover.

The vicarious immortality which the jealous but faithful Clytia thus secured was shared by other fabled personages, many of whom, according to that poetical sentiment which is begotten of all that is gentle and beautiful in nature, were changed into flowers. The idea is indeed a graceful one. For a beautiful youth or maiden, dying young and unhappy, no better recompense than such a flower-change could be imagined by a people, full indeed of the instinctive craving for immortality, but vague in their assurance of a life beyond the grave.

The nymphs who, hearing of the sad death of the beautiful Narcissus, hurried to perform his obsequies, found that he had been changed into a flower, the cup of which was filled with the tears that he had shed. “Bid daffodillies fill their cups with tears,” sings Milton, using the old English name for the narcissus. Rhodanthe, the universal praise of whose beauty had aroused the jealous anger of Artemis, was changed by Apollo into the rose. The pipe of Pan was fashioned from the reeds into which the nymph, Syrinx, had been transformed by her sister nymphs in their determination to rescue her from the god’s unwelcome overtures.

There are many instances in classical mythology wherein flowers were believed to have arisen from the blood, _i.e._ the very life, of dying persons. The violet sprang from the blood of Attis when Cybele changed him into a pine-tree. From the blood of Hyacinthus, killed in anger by Zephyrus, Apollo caused the hyacinth to grow. Acis, crushed to death by Polyphemus, was changed into a stream, but from his blood there sprang the flowering rush. According to the Egyptians the vine arose from the blood of the Titans.

In other cases tear-drops were, so to speak, the seed of the miracle. The anemone grew from the tears that Aphrodite shed at the death of Adonis:—

“Woe, woe for Cytherea, he hath perished, the lovely Adonis. A tear the Paphian sheds for each blood-drop of Adonis, And tears and blood on the earth are turned to flowers. The blood brings forth the rose; the tears, the wind-flower; Woe, woe for Cytherea, he hath perished, the lovely Adonis!”[172]

Shakespeare, it will be remembered, gives to the anemone the magical power of producing love.[173]

The legendary lore of the East contains traditions similar to those above mentioned, of which it will be sufficient to cite the following:—The Burmese believe that the _Canna Indica_ or Indian shot sprang from the sacred blood of the Buddha. His evil-minded brother-in-law, incensed at not being allowed to hold a separate assembly of his own, rolled down a rock upon the teacher from a lofty hill. A fragment bruised the Buddha’s toe, and drew from it a few drops of blood, from which the sacred plant arose.[174]

In another class of legends, more characteristic of mediaeval than of classical mythology, the _soul_ of the dead person was believed to pass into a tree. They are, in fact, cases rather of metempsychosis than of metamorphosis. A legend current in Cornwall tells how, after the loss of her lover, Iseult died broken-hearted, and was buried in the same church with Tristram, but by the king’s decree at some distance from him. Soon ivy sprang from either grave, and each branch grew and grew until it met its fellow at the crown of the vaulted roof, and there clasped it and clung to it as only ivy can.[175] In another version the plants that sprang from the graves of the lovers were a rose and a vine. The same idea is met with in the familiar ballad of Fair Margaret and Sweet William.

Margaret was buried in the lower chancèl, And William in the higher; Out of her breast there sprang a rose, And out of his a brier. They grew till they grew into the church top, And then they could grow no higher; And there they tyed in a true lover’s knot, Which made all the people admire.[176]

A story is told in Japan of a faithful couple who, after enjoying long years of happiness, died at last at the same moment; their spirits withdrew into a tall pine-tree of great age, which a god had once planted as he passed that way. On moonlight nights the lovers may be seen raking together the pine-needles under the tree, which to this day is known as the Pine of the Lovers.[177]

A certain Chinese king had a secretary, Hanpang, for whose young and beautiful wife he conceived a violent passion. Failing in his designs upon her, the king threw Hanpang into prison, where he shortly died of grief. His wife, to escape the royal suit, threw herself from a lofty terrace, having entreated as a last favour that she might be buried beside her husband. The king in his anger ordered otherwise. But that same night a cedar sprang from each grave, and in ten days they had become so tall and vigorous in their growth that they were able to interlace both branch and root, and the people called them the Trees of Faithful Love.[178]

In Germany the following story is told to explain why a certain blue flower, the endive, which grows by the roadside, is called the “Wegewarte” or way-watcher. A maiden, eagerly anticipating the return of her lover from a long voyage, visited every morning and evening the spot where they had parted, and anxiously paced the road, awaiting his coming. At last, worn out by her long vigil, she sank down by the wayside and expired. On the spot where she breathed her last the flower appeared.[179]

There is a Japanese story in which a mother is represented as hearing her dead son’s voice in the sighing of a sacred willow which grew above his grave.[180] Grimm quotes other examples.[181] In the song of Roncesvalles, a blackthorn grows above the dead Saracens, a white flower above the dead Christians. In other legends white lilies grow from the graves of persons unjustly executed. From a maiden’s grave grew three lilies which none but her lover might pluck.

In all these legends we have a survival of very primitive ideas about the soul, ideas out of which subsequently arose the formal doctrine of transmigration. The immortality of the soul was accepted, but there was always an inclination to quarter it in some new living thing. The instances above given, in which it was thought to pass into some plant, especially concern us, as illustrating the primitive belief that trees and shrubs might contain a spirit in human form.

A further derivative of the assumed kinship between human and vegetable life is the conception of the tree as sympathetically interwoven with the life and fortunes of an individual, a family, or a community. “In folktales the life of a person is sometimes so bound up with the life of a plant that the withering of the plant will immediately follow or be followed by the death of the person. Among the M‘Bengas in Western Africa, about the Gaboon, when two children are born on the same day the people plant two trees of the same kind and dance round them. The life of each of the children is believed to be bound up with the life of one of the trees, and if the tree dies or is thrown down they are sure that the child will soon die. In the Cameroons, also, the life of a person is believed to be sympathetically bound up with that of the tree. Some of the Papuans unite the life of a new-born child sympathetically with that of a tree, by driving a pebble into the bark of the tree. This is supposed to give them complete mastery over the child’s life; if the tree is cut down the child will die.”[182] According to the Talmud, the destruction of Bithar, in which four hundred thousand Israelites lost their lives, originated in the resentment of one of its inhabitants at the wanton destruction of a young cedar-tree, which, according to the custom of the place, he had planted at the birth of his child.[183]

It was usual amongst the Romans to plant a tree at the birth of a son, and from its vigour to forecast the prosperity of the child. It is related in the life of Virgil, that the poplar planted at his birth flourished exceedingly, and far outstripped all its contemporaries. A similar superstition has persisted even into times that are almost contemporary. Lord Byron, for all his scepticism, had the idea that his life and prosperity depended on the fate of an oak which he had planted when he first visited Newstead.[184]

The mystical relationship of man and tree is further illustrated in an old German belief quoted by Mannhardt, that a sick child placed in a hole made in a tree by sawing off a branch, or by splitting it open with a wedge, will recover as soon as the tree-wound heals. Should the child die and the tree survive, the human soul will inhabit the tree for the rest of its life.[185]

The family tree and the community tree were merely extensions of this conception. The heroic descendants of Pelops regarded the plane-tree as especially sacred to them and bound up with their fortunes, and in later times we find families taking their names from trees. Mannhardt quotes in this connection the German surnames Linde, Holunder, Kirschbaum, Birnbaum, etc.[186]

But more important than the family tree is the community tree. In many an old German village there stood a tree, often a May-tree, which the villagers guarded as the apple of their eye. It was looked upon as the life-tree, the tutelary genius, the second “I” of the whole community. Devotions were paid to it and gifts offered as to a deity.[187] The ancient fig-tree in the Comitium at Rome, already alluded to as a supposed descendant of the very tree under which Romulus and Remus were found, is another case in point.[188] It was held to be closely connected with the fortunes of the city, and Tacitus describes the terror of the Romans when, in the reign of Nero, it suddenly began to flag and wither, and their relief when, upon the Emperor’s death, it was found to have renewed its vigour.[189] Pliny tells of two myrtle-trees, called the Patrician and Plebeian, which grew before the temple of Quirinus at Rome. As sacred to Venus, and hence symbolical of union, these trees were held to represent the amity which existed between the two orders. At first they had grown with equal vigour, but when the patricians began to encroach upon the power of the plebs their tree outgrew the other, which languished beneath its baleful shadow. After the Marsian war, however, from which date the power of the Senate began to decline, it was noticed that the patrician tree showed signs of age, while the plebeian sprouted forth with new vigour.[190] Curiously enough, there is, or was so recently as 1885, an old tree in Jerusalem, opposite Cook’s office, belonging to an old family and protected by the Sultan’s firman, which the Arabs consider will fall when the Sultan’s rule ends. “It lost a large limb during the Turco-Russian war, and is now (1885) in a decayed state.”[191]

[Illustration: Fig. 24.—Imperial coin of Myra in Lycia, showing tree-goddess.(Goblet d’Alviella.)]

From conceptions such as these the transition is easy to that wider view which regarded the tree as the material representative of the mysterious feminine reproductive power, the good genius of general prosperity. We know that the Semitic nations worshipped under various names a great mother-goddess, the progenitrix of gods and men, and there is evidence to show that the tree was widely venerated as her divine symbol. In the coins of Heliopolis (Baalbek), where this great deity was worshipped under the name of Astarte, the figure of the goddess under the peristyle of her temple is sometimes replaced by a pyramidal cypress. In a coin of Myra, in Lycia, the bust of a goddess is represented in the foliage of a tree.[192] The goddess, who is of the veiled archaic type and wears on her head the _calathus_, the symbol of fertility, is identified by Mr. Farnell with Artemis-Aphrodite, “who is here clearly conceived as a divinity of vegetation.”[193] The Canaanites, and under their influence the Israelites, worshipped Ashtaroth, the fruitful goddess, under the symbol of an _ashêra_, a tree or pole, decked with fillets, like the May-tree. An ancient Babylonian cylinder represents a decorated tree with a worshipper beside it, who in the inscription invokes the goddess as her servant.[194] On other cylinders the tree-symbol sometimes accompanies and sometimes replaces the figure of Istar, the great procreative goddess more or less related to the goddess of the _ashêrim_.[195]

[Illustration: Fig. 25.—Sacred tree and worshipper.(Goblet d’Alviella.)]

The conception of the tree as the symbol of fertility seems to be still more clearly emphasised in the Assyrian cylinders and bas-reliefs, where it is conventionally represented as a date-palm between two personages, who approach it from either side bearing in their hands a cone similar to the inflorescence of the male date-palm. Mr. Tylor suggests that these personages, variously represented as kings or priests, genii with wings and heads of eagles, or mythical animals, may represent the fertilising winds or divinities, whose procreative influence was typified by the artificial fecundation of the palm, a procedure which is necessary for its successful culture, and which we know from Herodotus to have been familiar to the Babylonians.[196] The design is usually surmounted by the winged disc representing the sun, and the whole is not improbably meant to symbolise the mystery of procreation, in which the male element enshrined in the sun, and the female element inhabiting the tree are appropriately represented. The same collocation is met with on an altar from the Palmyrene now in Rome, on one of the faces of which is the image of a solar god, and on the other the figure of a cypress with a child carrying a ram amidst its foliage.[197] In this connection it may be remembered that Apuleius, wishing to paint the son of Venus in his mother’s lap, is related to have depicted him in the midst of a cypress-tree.

[Illustration: Fig. 26.—The sacred tree as symbol of fertility.(From an Assyrian bas-relief. Perrot et Chipiez.)]

The above facts are important for their bearing on the conception of a tree-inhabiting spirit of vegetation or generalised tree-soul, which, as Mannhardt and Frazer have shown, lies at the root of many otherwise inexplicable observances found amongst the peasantry in different countries and at different periods of history. These customs will be dealt with more fully in a subsequent chapter. In all of them we find a tree, or the branch of a tree, or a human being or puppet dressed to represent a tree, figuring as the symbol or representative of a spirit who is regarded as more or less friendly to man, and endowed with the power of assisting his material prosperity. In more primitive times than the present this prosperity resolved itself into a question of fecundity, and the power which could make the fields to bear, the flocks to multiply, and women to give increase, naturally held the foremost place in the affections of the people. The rich and the cultured found other attributes to worship and other gods to personify them, but the peasant clung to the observances by which the spirit of fertility was propitiated. Hence the tree, long after it had ceased to be worshipped as the home of the great gods, or to be regarded as the parent of mankind, still held a firm place in the devotions of the people as the embodiment of the all-powerful patron of universal fertility.

Of the innumerable observances founded on this idea the following may be taken as a sample. The sacred chili or cedar of Gilgit, on the north-western frontier of India, was held to have the power of causing the herds to multiply and women to bear children. At the commencement of wheat-sowing three chosen unmarried youths, who had undergone purification for three days, started for the mountains where the cedars grew, taking with them wine, oil, and bread, and fruit of every kind. Having found a suitable tree they sprinkled the oil and wine on it, while they ate the bread and fruit as a sacrificial feast. Then they cut off a branch and brought it to the village, where amid general rejoicing it was placed on a large stone beside running water. A goat was then sacrificed and its blood poured over the cedar branch, while the villagers danced around it. The goat’s flesh was eaten, and every man went to his house bearing a spray of cedar. On his arrival he said to his wife, “If you want children I have brought them to you; if you want cattle I have brought them; whatever you want, I have it.”[198]

The same idea is no doubt to be traced in the form of survival, in the custom of giving a branch of laurel to a bride which is found, according to Mannhardt, at Carnac in Brittany;[199] in the introduction of a decorated pine-bough into the house of the bride, met with in Little Russia, as well as in the ceremony of “carrying the May,” adorned with lights, before the bride and bridegroom in Hanoverian weddings.[200]

The day of these observances is past, but underlying them there was a vital and still valid truth. To us as to the ancients the tree is still the patron of fertility, as those have discovered to their cost who have bared a country of its forests. To us as to them it is still the thing of all things living that is endowed with the most enduring life, the most persistent vigour. Generations come and go, but the tree lives on and every spring puts forth new leaves, and every autumn bears new seed, and even to its last decrepitude the leaves are as green and the seeds as full of life as in the prime of its youth. What changes has not the oldest tree in England witnessed! In the southern counties there is an ancient way, once thronged by travellers, but now deserted and broken in its continuity; yet to this day, even where parks and pastures have overlain it, its course may still be traced by the yew-trees planted at its side by pilgrims journeying to the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury, in the days when their brothers were fighting for the White Rose or the Red.

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