hat shall defy even the
fires of the final conflagration. Iduna, or Spring, sits in those
boughs with her apples of rejuvenescence, restoring the wasted strength
of the gods. In the shade of its topmost branches stands Asgard, the
abode of the Asen, who are called the Rafters of the World,--to wit,
Odin, Thor, Freir, and the other higher powers, male and female, of the
old Teutonic religion. In Asgard is Valhalla, the hall of elect heroes.
The roots of this mundane ash reach as far downwards as its branches do
upwards. Its roots, trunk, and branches together thrid the universe,
shooting Hela, the kingdom of death, Midgard, the abode of men, and
Asgard, the dwelling of the gods, like so many concentric rings.

This ash was a psychological and ontological plant. All the lore of
Plato and Kant and Fichte and Cousin was audible in the sigh of its
branches. Three Norns, Urt, Urgand, and Skuld, dwelt beneath it, so
that it comprehended time past, present, and future. The gods held
their councils beneath it. By one of its stems murmured the Fountain of
Mimir, in Niflheim or Mistland, from whose urn welled up the ocean and
the rivers of the earth. Odin had his outlook in its top, where kept
watch and ward the All-seeing Eye. In its boughs frisked and gambolled
a squirrel called _Busybody_, which carried gossip from bough to root
and back. The warm Urdar Fountain of the South, in which swam the sun
and moon in the shape of two swans, flowed by its celestial stem in
Asgard. A tree so much extended as this ash of course had its parasites
and _rodentia_ clinging to it and gnawing it; but the brave old ash
defied them all, and is to wave its skywide umbrage even over the ruins
of the universe, after the _dies irae_ shall have passed. So sings the
Voluspa. This tree is a worthy type of the Teutonic race, so green, so
vigorous, so all-embracing. We should expect to find the chief object
in the Northern myth-world a tree. The forest was ever dear to the sons
of the North, and many ancient Northern tribes used to hold their
councils and parliaments under the branches of some wide-spreading oak
or ash. Like its type, Yggdrasil, the Teutonic race seems to be
threading the earth with the roots of universal dominion, and, true to
hereditary instincts, it is belting the globe with its colonies,
planting it, as it were, with slips from the great Mundane Ash, and
throwing Bifroest bridges across oceans, in the shape of
telegraph-cables and ste