‘Fare thee well at once!
The glow-worm shows the matins to be near.’
According to a popular notion formerly current, the presence of unearthly beings was announced by an alteration in the tints of the lights which happened to be burning—a superstition alluded to in ‘Richard III.’ (Act v. sc. 3)—where the tyrant exclaims as he awakens:
‘The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight,
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
.......
Methought the souls of all that I had murder’d
Came to my tent.’
So in ‘Julius Cæsar’ (Act iv. sc. 3), Brutus, on seeing the ghost of Cæsar, exclaims:
‘How ill this taper burns. Ha! who comes here?’
CHAPTER XXVIII
SPIRIT-HAUNTED TREES
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:
Into a cloven pine, within which rift
Imprison’d, thou didst painfully remain
A dozen years....
... Where thou didst vent thy groans,
As fast as mill-wheels strike.
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’: