Does the reader care to know the meaning of all this? It is hardly worth while, since to those who feel its grotesque poetry quite enough of the symbolism is already revealed. But let the plodding German FRIEDREICH 'have his say.' 'The name of the Ash, Yggdrasil,' he tell us, 'signifies God's Horse, from YGGR, a name of the god Odin, and _drasil_, the poetic term for a horse. With this name one hath GOD'S rule over all things, since he ruleth them even as a rider controls his steed, and by _Yggdrasil_ is consequently signified the almighty power of GOD. The Ash is the Universe, its 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 _Parcæ_--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 _Froschmäusler_ the same idea is expressed in these quaint verses: