It is strange how men have been fascinated by the rough and rugged Icelandic mythology born of ice and snow and rocks lashed by glacial winds; and nights that are light as day, days that are black as night; an existence which was one long fight against the elements, and struggle for life with bears and wolves. The Roman poets, on the other hand, born in the soft, voluptuous creed of the Greeks, a religion in which the gods and goddesses, much too human, were worshipped in temples built amid the enchanting fragrance of roseleaf islands, shuddered at the very idea of the North. For them there would have been nothing but terror in those strong Sagas, which in other countries gave birth to noble poetry and stately music. As told by Ovid, the story of the punishment of Erisichthon, who mocked the gods and would not sacrifice at their altars, illustrates the worship of trees and also the dread of the inhospitable North, and yet a North that was no Arctic region; nothing, indeed, more terrible than the Caucasus. In ancient Thessaly, in the midst of a wood sacred to Ceres, there stood an oak, a sturdy veteran, a grove in itself, covered with votive offerings, the tokens of the honour which was paid to it. Round it the Dryads, hand in hand, were wont to hold their choirs and dance in festive revelry. It was a holy tree, but in spite of all its sanctity, against it Erisichthon raised his sacrilegious axe and bade his men strike home, swearing, when they hesitated, that were the tree not merely dear to the goddess, but if it were the goddess herself, it should lie low and kiss the earth with its topmost boughs. Under the stroke of the axe the sacred tree groaned; its leaves and acorns, and even the branches turned pale. But when the impious hand inflicted the first cruel wound, blood flowed as from a bull at a sacrifice before the altars. Horrified, the men were stricken dumb, and one, bolder than the others, would fain have put a stop to the crime and stayed the falling axe. “Be this the guerdon of thy piety?” cried the Thessalian, turning the weapon against the man; severed his head from his body, and repeated his attack upon the tree. From the heart of the oak there came a voice, saying, “Under this tree am I, a nymph beloved by Ceres, and my dying prophecy is that thy deeds shall be punished as the consolation for my death.” Nothing stops him from his crime; at last, under the many blows, and dragged by ropes, the tree collapses, and with its weight breaks down much of the grove.