axe, and approached it, declaring that nothing should save the 

 Oak :— 



"He spoke, and as he pois'd a slanting stroke, 

 Sighs heav'd and tremblings shook the frighted Oak; 

 Its leaves look'd sickly, pale its Acorns grew, 

 And its long branches sweat a chilly dew, 

 But when his impious hand a wound bestow'd, 

 Blood from the mangled bark in currents flow'd. 

 ♦ **•«* 



The wonder all amaz'd : yet one more bold, 



The fact dissuading, strove his axe to hold ; 



But the Thessalian, obstinately bent, 



Too proud to change, too harden'd to repent, 



On his kind monitor his eyes, which bum'd 



With rage, and with his eyes his weapon, turn'd ; 



Take the reward (says he) of pious dread ; — 



Then with a blow lopp'd off his parted head. 



No longer check'd, the wretch his crime pursued, 



Doubled his strokes, and sacrilege renew'd ; 



When from the groaning trunk a voice was heard, — 



'A Dryad I,' by Ceres' love preferred, 



Within the circle of this clasping rind 



Coeval grew, and now in rain join'd ; 



But instant vengeance shall thy sin pursue, 



And death is cheered with this prophetic view." 



Garth's Ovid. 



WFee ^piflfjt). 



Ovid, in his ' Metamorphoses,' has told us how, after Daphne 

 had been changed into a Laurel, the nymph-tree still panted and 

 heaved her heart ; how, when Phaethon's grief-stricken sisters were 

 transformed into Poplars, they continued to shed tears, which were 

 changed into amber ; how Myrrha, metamorphosed into a tree, still 

 wept, in her bitter grief, the precious drops which retain her name ; 

 how Dryope, similarly transformed, imparted her life to the 

 branches, which glowed with a human heat ; and how the tree into 

 which the nymph Lotis had been changed, shook with sudden 

 horror when its blossoms were plucked and blood welled from the 

 broken stalks. In these poetic conceptions it is easy to see the 

 embodiment of a belief very rife among the Greeks and Romans 

 that trees and shrubs were tenanted in some mysterious manner by 

 spirits. Thus Virgil tells us that when ^neas had travelled far in 

 search of the abodes of the blest — 



" He came to groves, of happy souls the rest ; 

 To evergreens, the dwellings of the blest." 



Nor was this notion confined simply to the Greeks and 

 Romans, for among the ancients generally there existed a wide- 

 spread belief that trees were either the haunts of disembodied 

 spirits, or contained within their material growth the actual spirits 

 themselves. Evelyn tells us that " the Ethnics do still repute all 

 great trees to be divine, and the habitations of souls departed : 



