124 THE YEW. 



farer who lingered to gather cowslips in the meads 

 around, or to note the tender blue of the innumer- 

 able forget-me-not, or to mark the flow of the tran- 

 quil river and its darting fishes ; everything is 

 gone except the sweet and solemn requiem pro- 

 nounced by ruin, everything except those grand 

 old trees, which seem capable of witnessing the 

 rise and fall of just such another fabric, were some 

 architect to tempt them with renewal of the old 

 magnificence. 



It may be useful and practically good to deem 

 the yew an emblem of death. We are taught here, 

 as in a thousand other places, that it is better to 

 deem it an emblem of the Changeless, that is to say, 

 of Life. Nothing is lost and everything is gained 

 by letting nature speak to us, whenever she will, 

 of immortality. The lesson of death and decay is 

 too plainly and too constantly recited to make it 

 needful that we should go out of our way for illus- 

 trations ; much more should we refrain from con- 

 verting symbols that are inherently suggestive of 

 good into emblems of what is only too familiar in 

 its reality. 



Botanically considered, the yew holds a place in 

 nature shared by only a small company. Plain and 

 palpable as are the great classes and families into 

 which plants are resolvable by men of science, every 

 one of them a solar system, as it were, in miniature, 

 certain grand ideas of structure constituting centres 



