EVERGKEEN BEAUTY. 65 



Where light-lieel'd ghosts and visionary shades, 

 Beneath the wan, cold moon (as fame reports) 

 Embodied thick, perform their mystic rounds. 

 Xo other merriment, dull tree ! is thine.' 



There is, however, a gleam of admiration in 

 some lines of Wordsworth : 



' Of vast circumference and gloom profound, 

 This solitary tree ! A living thing 

 Produced too slowly ever to decay ; 

 Of form and aspect too magnificent 

 To be destroyed.' 



The popular idea seems to associate the Yew with 

 death and the graveyard, and 'no other merri- 

 ment, dull tree, is thine,' in the lines just quoted, 

 appears to imply that only ' 'midst skulls and 

 coffins, epitaphs and worms,' is this tree to be 

 found, just as the carrion crow is associated 

 with death and putrefaction. But it is forgot- 

 ten that it is the hand of man which has placed 

 the Yew in the midst of its surroundings of 

 mournfulness and gloom, and that it is naturally 

 a forest tree. In its praise we could write a very 

 long chapter, but we can only give to it its pro- 

 portionate space in this brief history of the ever- 



V 



