The practice of these decorations, which is recommended to modern times by its own pleasantness and natural beauty, is of very high antiquity, and has been ascribed by various writers to various sources. They who are desirous of tracing a Christian observance to a Christian cause remind us of those figurative expressions in the prophets which speak of the Messiah as the "Branch of righteousness," etc., and describe by natural allusions the fertility which should attend his coming. "The Lord shall comfort Zion," says Isaiah: "he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord." Again, "The glory of Lebanon shall come unto thee, the fir tree, the pine tree, and the box together, to beautify the place of my sanctuary; and I will make the place of my feet glorious." And Nehemiah, on an occasion of rejoicing, orders the people, after the law of Moses, to "go forth unto the mount and fetch olive branches, and pine branches, and myrtle branches, and palm branches, and branches of thick trees," and to make booths thereof, "every one upon the roof of his house, and in their courts, and in the courts of the house of God," and in the streets; "and all the congregation of them that were come again out of the captivity" sat under these booths, "and there was very great gladness." A writer in the "Gentleman's Magazine" asks if this custom may not be referred, as well as that of the palms on Palm Sunday, to that passage in the Scripture account of Christ's entry into Jerusalem which states that the multitude "cut down branches from the trees, and strawed them in the way." The practice, however, of introducing flowers and branches amongst the tokens of festivity seems, and very naturally, to have existed universally and at all times. It was, as we know, a pagan manifestation of rejoicing and worship, and is forbidden on that express ground in early councils of the Christian Church. Hone, in his "Every-Day Book," quotes Polydore Virgil to the effect that "trymming of the temples with hangynges, flowres, boughes, and garlondes, was taken of the heathen people, whiche decked their idols and houses with suche array;" and it came under the list of abominations denounced by the Puritans for the same reason. The practice was also in use amongst the nations both of Gothic and Celtic origin; and Brand quotes from Dr. Chandler's "Travels in Greece" a very beautiful superstition, mentioned as the reason of this practice, amongst the votaries of Druidism. "The houses," he says, "were decked with evergreens in December, that the sylvan spirits might repair to them and remain unnipped with frost and cold winds until a milder season had renewed the foliage of their darling abodes."