ts twigs are the Ether, spread over the World-all; the
eagle is the Infinite glance, penetrating heaven and earth; and the
squirrel the medium by which the deeds and condition of the Gods are
brought to men. The stags, whose swiftness betokens the restless, rapid
passions of man, are the ailments of the soul; and the green leaves
which they devour, are sound, healthy thoughts.' According to Hauch
(_Die Nordische Mythenlehre_, Leipsic, 1847, p. 28), these swift stags
are the four winds of heaven which scatter the leaves. The snake is the
destroying force in Nature, and in the clear fountain lies wisdom--which
at least teaches us the highly respectable origin of the assertion that
'truth lies at the bottom of a well.' In the next spring lies the
knowledge of the future--hinting at much fortune telling by means of
pools, and faces of future husbands in basins of water and mirrors;
while the three virgins are the _Parcae_--the goddesses of destiny. You
know these ladies, reader; but here they are grander, gloomier, diviner
than were our old friends Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. And the endless
strife between the eagle and the serpent, stirred up by the squirrel, is
the 'ever-battling, interchangeable action between Spirit and Matter,
the ever hence-and-hither rolling, as of waves, to good or evil in the
human heart.'

Quaint enough, yet strong, wild, and beautiful. One more explanation is
however worth the giving. In all countries and in all ages, writers,
from Pliny and Dioscorides down to the genial poet-author of 'Elsie
Venner,' have said or hinted that the Ash is abhorred by serpents--an
antipathy ridiculed by Evelyn, yet which I have heard maintained to be
true by an eminent botanist. In our Edda legend, we find an enmity
between the Serpent--the evil principle, and a foe to life and
peace--and the Ash--the tree of fresh, vigorous life; the first ever
striving to destroy the latter. Is this the origin of the old belief? So
in the 'Arcana against Enchantment,' a German book of 1715, we are told
that 'the antipathy between the Ash tree, blessed of God, and the
Serpent, which so hateth man, is so great that a serpent would rather
spring into the fire than into the shadow of an Ash tree.' And in
_Froschmaeusler_ the same idea is expressed in these quaint verses:

'Ich bin von den Alten gelart,
Der Eschenbaum hab diese Arth,
Dass keine Schlang unter ihm bleib;
Der Schatten sie auch hinweg treib,
Ja die Sc