“With fear
The poor she-Jew begs in my Lady’s ear,
The grove’s high-priestess, heaven’s true messenger,
Jerusalem’s old laws expounds to her.”
The Druids, besides being priests, prophets, and legislators, were also physicians; they were acquainted, too, with the means of producing trances and ecstacies, and as one of their chief medical appliances they made use of the Mistletoe, which they gathered at appointed times with certain solemn ceremonies, and considered it as a special gift of heaven. This plant grew on the Oak, the sacred tree of the Celts and Druids; it was held in the highest reverence, and both priests and people then regarded it as divine. To this day the Welsh call Pren-awr—the celestial tree—
“The mystic Mistletoe,
Which has no root, and cannot grow
Or prosper but by that same tree
It clings to.”
The sacred Oak itself was thought to possess certain magical properties in evoking the spirit of prophecy: hence we find the altars of the Druids were often erected beneath some venerated Oak-tree in the sombre recesses of the sacred grove; and it was under the shadow of such trees that the ancient Germans offered up their holy sacrifices, and their inspired bards made their prophetic utterances. The Greeks had their prophetic Oaks that delivered the oracles of Jupiter in the sacred grove of Dodona—