According to Empedocles ‘there are two destinies for the souls of highest virtue—to pass into trees or into the bodies of lions,’ this conception of plants as the habitation of the departing soul being founded on the old idea of transmigration. Illustrations of the primitive belief meet us in all ages, reminding us how Dante passed through that leafless wood, in the bark of every tree of which was confined a suicide; and of Ariel’s imprisonment:

In German folk-lore the soul is supposed occasionally to take the form of a flower, as a lily or white rose; and, according to a popular belief, one of these flowers appears on the chairs of those about to die. Grimm[321] tells a pretty tale of a child who ‘carries home a bud which the angel had given him in the wood; when the rose blooms the child is dead.’ Similarly, from the grave of one unjustly executed white lilies are said to spring as a token of the person’s innocence, and from that of a maiden three lilies, which no one save her lover must gather, a superstition which, under one form or another, has largely prevailed both amongst civilised and savage communities. In Iceland it is said that when innocent persons are put to death, the sorb or mountain ash will spring over their grave, and the Lay of Runzifal makes a blackthorn shoot out of the bodies of slain heathens, and a white flower by the heads of fallen Christians. The well-known story of ‘Tristram and Ysonde’ tells how ‘from his grave there grew an eglantine which twined about the statue, a marvel for all men to see; and though three times they cut it down, it grew again, and ever wound its arms about the image of the fair Ysonde.’ With which legend may be compared the old Scottish ballad of ‘Fair Margaret and Sweet William’:

It is to this time-honoured fancy that Laertes refers when he wishes that violets may spring from the grave of Ophelia,[322] and Lord Tennyson has borrowed the same idea:

Some of the North-Western Indians believed that those who died a natural death would be compelled to dwell among the branches of tall trees, and the Brazilians have a mythological character called Mani[324]—a child who died and was buried in the house of her mother. Soon a plant—the Mandioca—sprang out of the grave, which grew, flourished, and bore fruit. According to the Iroquois, the spirits of certain trees are supposed to have the forms of beautiful females; recalling, writes Mr. Herbert Spencer,[325] ‘the dryads of classic mythology, who, similarly conceived as human-shaped female spirits, were sacrificed to in the same ways that human spirits in general were sacrificed to.’ ‘By the Santals,’ he adds, ‘these spirits or ghosts are individualised. At their festivals the separate families dance round the particular trees which they fancy their domestic lares chiefly haunt.’

In modern Greece certain trees are supposed to have their ‘stichios,’ a being variously described as a spectre, a wandering soul, a vague phantom, occasionally invisible, and sometimes assuming the most widely different forms. When a tree is ‘stichimonious,’ it is generally considered dangerous for anyone ‘to sleep beneath its shade, and the woodcutters employed to cut it down will lie upon the ground and hide themselves, motionless, and holding their breath, at the moment when it is about to fall, dreading lest the stichio at whose life the blow is aimed with each blow of the axe, should avenge itself at the precise moment when it is dislodged.’[326] This idea is abundantly illustrated in European folk-lore, and a Swedish legend tells how, when a man was on the point of cutting down a juniper tree, a voice was heard saying, ‘Friend, hew me not.’ But he gave another blow, when, to his horror and amazement, blood gushed from the root.

Such spirit-haunted trees have been supposed to give proof of their peculiar character by certain weird and mysterious signs. Thus the Australian bush-demons whistle in the branches, and Mr. Schoolcraft mentions an Indian tradition of a hollow tree, from the recesses of which there issued on a calm day a sound like the voice of a spirit. Hence it was considered to be inhabited by some powerful spirit, and was deemed sacred. The holes in trees have been supposed to be the doors through which the spirits pass, a belief which reappears in the German idea that the holes in the oak are the pathways for elves, and that various diseases may be cured by contact with these holes. It is not surprising, too, that the idea of spirit-haunted trees caused them to be regarded by the superstitious with feelings of awe. Mr. Dorman tells us[327] of certain West Indian tribes, that if any person going through a wood perceived a motion in the trees which he regarded as supernatural, frightened at the strange prodigy, he would address himself to that tree which shook the most. Similarly, when the wind blows the long grass or waving corn, the German peasant is wont to say that the ‘Grass-wolf,’ or the ‘Corn-wolf’ is abroad. Under a variety of forms this animistic conception is found in different parts of the world, and has been embodied in many a folk-tale—an Austrian MÄrchen relating, for instance, how there sits in a stately fir-tree a fairy maiden waited on by a dwarf, rewarding the innocent and plaguing the guilty; and there is the German song of the maiden in the pine, whose bark the boy split with a gold and silver horn.