are still preserved in the sacristies of churches, mainly in the South of France. Their origin is at once evident; and on more than one of them-such is the unchanging spirit of the Eastthe emblems which figure so largely in Assyrian palaces, and which are seen also on the robes of personages represented on their walls, are reproduced with but slender variation. Among them occurs the sacred tree, with its conventional leaves and flowers. These tissues, it is probable, were woven in the looms of Baghdad or Bussora, where the ancient typical forms may have been longer preserved than elsewhere.* Their singularity, and their beauty, as set forth by the gold and rich colours of the brocade, seem to have greatly struck the Roman and FrancoRoman artists of Gaul. They copied them in the sculpture of their churches; and according to some of the most eminent French antiquaries, the mystical tree of Assyria between its guardian lions is represented on the tympana of many church portals of various dates, but all of early character. The form of the tree varies; and the lions are sometimes replaced by dragons or winged monsters. But there is always sufficient resemblance to trace the general design; and it is not perhaps impossible that some of the grotesque carvings on churches built in England during the early Norman period may have had a similar origin. The subject is at least a curious one, and deserves a careful examination at the hands of archæologists. 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 datepalms 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 *The Zoroastrian Homa or Sacred Tree was preserved by the Persians, almost as represented on the Assyrian monuments, until the Arab invasion.'Layard, Nineveh, ii. 472. † For some remarks on this subject, see the 'Bulletin Monumental,' edited by M. de Caumont, vol. 18, pp. 489-494. Some illustrations are there given, including ty mpana from the churches of Marigny and of Colleville, both in the Department of Calvados. 'Albescit 'Albescit palmæ coma; ramus ejus osanna 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 season. It is possible that the cedar had its Western representative at a much earlier period. Many of its characteristics-its dignity, especially, and its strength-are, among the trees of Europe, most conspicuous in the oak. It is true, indeed, that at the very remote period, certainly more than 4000 years ago, when the first bands of Aryan wanderers reached the shores of Europe, much of the soil of this continent was covered with forests composed exclusively of firtrees, which were replaced, first by a vegetation of oaks, and afterwards by one of beech trees. The occurrence of such a series of changes in Denmark has been proved by Sir Charles Lyell, in his recent volume, and is remarkably borne out by certain changes of signification in the most ancient Aryan names for the fir and the oak.* The pine forests of that primæval period may well have been solemn and gigantic, worthy fosterers of the religion and the imagination that were bursting into life beneath their roof 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 splintered 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 hammer-wielding 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, .... 'The Anglo-Saxon furh means fir, and so does the German föhre. But the same word, as fixed in Latin, namely quercus (changed in analogy to five and quinque), means oak, and so does the old word fereha, which occurs in the Laws of Rothar... The Aryan tribes, all speaking dialects of the same language, who came to settle in Europe during the Fir period, a 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 Oak period would apply the same word to the oak. Report of Professor Max Müller's Fifth Lecture on the Science of Language, in the 'Saturday Review,' April 25, 1863. a species 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 : '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 stand-that 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 fragments, 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 enchanter's staff, were on such an occasion to present himself, we should scarcely feel 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 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 granite, many of which rise higher than the trees. The boughs are thickly clothed with dark green and grey mosses, that hang in long beard-like tangles, and add not a little to the weird look of the strange old wood, which it is difficult to visit, even at mid-day, without a certain 'eerie' feeling. Its real age is unknown; but it is mentioned in documents relating to Dartmoor which date soon after the Conquest; and more than eight hundred concentric rings have been counted in a section from the trunk of one of the larger trees. Wistman's Wood has no traditions of Merlin; but its name takes us back to a personage yet more mysterious —Woden, the 'Lord of the Waste and the Mountain.' 'Wisc,' or wish,' was, according to Mr. Kemble, one of the many titles of the great Saxon deity, and the name is retained in the Devonshire term whishtness,' used to signify all unearthly creatures and their doings. The spectral pack which hunts over Dartmoor is called the 'wish-hounds,' and the black 'master' who follows the chase is, no doubt, the same who has left his mark on Wistman's Wood. 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 mistletoe of the Druids, not in the Viscum album of our own woods and orchards, but in the Loranthus Europæus, 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 Æneas to the wonders of 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 appropriately, in all the orchards about Glastonbury-that famous Isle of Avalon, which was very possibly a stronghold of Druidism, and which, according to the ancient tradition, contained the tomb of the great British hero King Arthur. There is no proof that the Loranthus ever grew farther north than at present; and, on the other hand, the mistletoe figures in the traditions of the Northern nations as well as in those of the Celts. It was a branch of mistletoe which killed Baldur, the whitest' and best of the Gods, after Freyja had taken an oath of all created things that they would never hurt him; except one little shoot that groweth east of Valhall, so small and feeble that she forgot to take its oath.' But the mistletoe, thus forgotten, was put by Loke the destroyer into the hand of the blind Hodr, who flung it at Baldur when all the gods were amusing themselves by pelting him with the various creatures which had sworn to Freyja; and Baldur fell dead, pierced by the feeble' branch, More than one sword of a Northern champion was named Mistilteinn,' after the weapon which had slain the white god. The story affords one of many points of resemblance between the mythology of Northern Europe and those of Persia and the farther East. In the Shah Namêh the hero Asfendiar is represented as invulnerable except by a branch from a tree growing on the remotest shore of the ocean. Desthân, his enemy, found it, hardened it with fire, and killed the hero. Both legends possibly refer to the 'death' of the sun; perishing in his youthful vigour either at the end of a day, struck by the powers of darkness, or at the end of the sunny season, stung by the thorn of winter.' 6 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 * Max Müller; 'Comparative Mythology,' in Oxford Essays for 1856. portion |