The
Teutonic myth of the World-tree was dealt with fully in the
chapter on Subterranean Waters. But it is well to mention it now
in connection with the far-extended group of myths which
centre in the idea of a tree of life, which preserved their vitality
in changing forms, and which even appear in Dante in his
account of the mystical marriage under the withered tree. Virgil
was a lover of trees; the glade and the forest appealed to him by
the same magic of suggested life as that which works on the
modern poet or nature-lover.
It is generally supposed that, in England, the loving insight of
the nature-mystic was practically unknown until Collins,
Thomson, and Crabbe led the way for the triumph of the Lake
poets.
This may be true for many natural objects--but it is not true for
all. How fresh these lines from an address to his muse by
Wither:
"By the murmur of a spring,
Or the least bough's rustelling;
By a daisy whose leaves spread,
Shut when Titan goes to bed;
Or a shady bush or tree,--
She could more infuse in me
Than all Nature's beauties can
In some other wiser man."
Surely this is the voice of Wordsworth in Tudor phraseology.
Still more startling is this passage from Marvell, out of the
midst of the Commonwealth days: so remarkable is its Nature
Mysticism and its Wordsworthian feeling and insight, that it
must be given without curtailment. It occurs in the poem on the
"Garden."
"Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas,
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade,
Here at the fountain's sliding foot,
Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root,
Casting the body's vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide:
There, like a bird, it sits and sings,
Then whets and combs its silver wings,
And, till prepared for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.
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