tion
which brought into the very bosom of the church so much genial, latent
heresy and heathen daring, kept the Ivy alive--for Nature and Truth
_will_ live, and man will have his guardian angels, who will hope for
him and for the dawn, though buried in the deepest night and lost among
horrible dreams and ghastly incubi. A French writer on mediaeval art[5]
has declared that an excellent work might be written on the foliage of
Christian architecture, but regrets that the relations of the leaves as
employed--or, in fact, the law guiding their employment--should be
unintelligible. Let them be studied according to their symbolical and
antique meaning, and they will seem clear as legible letters; and to
those who can read them, the gloomy Gothic piles will ray forth a
strange and beautiful light--the sympathetic light of congenial minds
long passed away, yet who did not vanish ere they had breathed out to
those who were to come after them, in leaf or other character, their
hatred of _the tyrant_, and their unfailing conviction of the Great
Truth. GOD bless them all! I have studied for hours their solemn
symbols--each a cry for freedom and a prayer for light; and when I
thought of the gloom and cruelty and devilishness of the foul age which
pressed around them, I wondered that they, knowing what they did, could
have lived--ay, lived and sung and given a soul to art. And,
understanding them in spirit and in truth, every Ivy-leaf carved by them
seemed the whole Prometheus bound and unbound--yes, all poems of truth,
all myths, all religion.

And as it is the leaf of life, so is it by that very fact the leaf of
_death_; for death is only the water of life. And in this sense we find
a rare beauty in the poem by Mrs. Hemans, though she saw its truth, not
through the dim glass of tradition, but by direct communion with Nature.

TO THE IVY.

OCCASIONED BY RECEIVING A LEAF GATHERED
IN THE CASTLE OF RHEINFELS.

Oh! how could fancy crown with thee,
In ancient days, the god of wine,
And bid thee at the banquet be,
Companion of the vine?
Thy home, wild plant, is where each sound
Of revelry hath long been o'er;
Where song's full notes once peal'd around,
But now are heard no more.

The Roman, on his battle plains,
Where kings before his eagles bent,
Entwined thee, with exulting strains,
Around the victor's tent;
Yet there, though fresh in glossy green,
Triumpha