124 FAMILIAR TREES 
it is with exquisite feeling that it is made afterwards the chief 
tree in the groves of Proserpine, its light and quivering leafage 
having exactly the melancholy expression of fragility, faintness, 
and inconstancy which the ancients attributed to the disembodied 
spirit. The likeness to the Poplars by the streams of Amiens is 
more marked still in the Iliad, where the young Simois, struck by 
Ajax, falls to the earth ‘like an Aspen that has grown in an 
irrigated meadow, smooth-trunked, the soft shoots springing from 
its top, which some coach-making man has cut down with his keen 
iron, that he may fit a wheel of it to a fair chariot, and it lies 
parching by the side of the stream.’” 
In spite, however, of Mr. Ruskin’s decision, Pro- 
fessor Daubeny was of opinion that Homer’s Aigeiros 
was not the Aspen, but the Black Poplar (Po’pulus 
nigra L,), on the ground that the latter is common, 
the former not common, in Greece. Fraas, however, 
found Aspen at an altitude of 1,800 feet on the north 
side of Parnes and on the Achelous, and Sibthorp 
records it in Beotia. But we cannot help thinking 
that any species of Poplar has sufficiently mobile 
leaves to suggest the poet’s language. 
From Homer to Thomson is indeed a fall; but 
there is true observation in the latter’s description 
of 
“A perfect calm; that not a breath 
Is heard to quiver through the closing woods, 
Or rustling turn the many-twinkling leaves 
Of Aspen tall.” 
The grace of the whole tree would seem more 
than once to have suggested the fair sex to writers on 
the Aspen, though their remarks are hardly compli- 
mentary. Thus Gerard says of it: “In English 
Aspe and Aspen-tree, and may also be called Trem- 
ble, after the French name, considering it is the 
