"Oh, the mistletoe-bough!" who hath not, at the name, thronging visions of sweet faces that looked sweetest in those moments of their startled beauty beneath the pendent bough! If the old spells with which superstition has invested the mistletoe have lost some of their power over me, it hath now another, which in earlier days I knew not of,—the power to restore the distant and to raise the dead. I am to laugh no more as I have laughed of old beneath the influence of that mystic cognizance of the gay Christmas-tide; but even now as I write thereof, look in upon my heart bright portraits, traced with a skill which no mortal pencil shall achieve,—faces on which the earth hath long lain, and others from whom the wide spaces of the world have separated me for many a weary year; and, heavier far, some to whom unkindness hath made me too long a stranger! There they rise and stand, one by one, beneath the merry snare, each with the heightened beauty on her cheek, which is the transient gift of the sacred bough!
O M——! how very fair is thine image in the eye of memory, and how has thy going away changed all things for me! The bright and the beautiful lie still about,—still bright and beautiful even to me,—but in another manner than when thou wert here. All things are tinged with thy loss. All fair things have a look, and all sweet sounds a tone, of mourning since thou leftest me. How long it seems, as if ages, instead of years, of the grave had grown between us, as if, indeed, I had known thee in some former and far-removed state of being! I do not love to think of thee as dead, I strive to think of thee rather as of one whom I have left behind in the quiet valley of our youth and our love,—from whom I have wandered forth and lost my way amid the mazes of the world. But where is the clew that should lead me back to thee? There may have been fairer (sweeter never) things than thou in this fair world, but my heart could never be made to believe or understand it. Had I known thee only in that world, I might not so have marked thy beauty; but thou wert with me when the world left me. In the flood of the sunshine, when a thousand birds are about us, we go upon our way with a sense that there is melody around, but singling perhaps no one note to take home to the heart and make a worship of. But the one bird that sings to us in the dim and silent night—oh! none but they on whom the night has fallen can know how dear its song becomes, filling with its music all the deserted mansions of the lonely soul. But the bird is dead, the song is hushed, and the houses of my spirit are empty and silent and desolate!
And thou whom the grave hath not hidden, nor far distance removed, from whom I parted as if it were but yesterday, and yet of whom I have already learned to think as of one separated from me by long years of absence and death, as if it were very long since I had beheld thee,—as if I gazed upon thee from a far distance across the lengthened and dreary alleys of the valley of the dead! Physically speaking, thou art still within my reach; and yet art thou to me as if the tomb or the cloister had received thee, and made of thee (what the world or the grave makes of all things we have loved) a dream of the night, a phantom of the imagination, an angel of the memory, a creation of the hour of shadows! Whatever may be thy future fortunes, however thy name may hereafter be borne to my mortal ear, my heart will ever refuse to picture thee but as one who died in her youth!
And thou!—thou too art there, with thy long fair hair and that harp of thine which was so long an ark of harmony for me. "Alas! we had been friends in youth." But all things bring thee back, and I am haunted yet, and shall be through the world, by the airs which thou wert wont to sing me long ago. I remember that even in those days, at times, in the silent night, when broken snatches of melodies imperfectly remembered stole through the chambers of my heart,—ever in the sweet tones in which it had learned to love them,—I have asked myself if the ties that bound us might ever be like those passing and half-forgotten melodies; if the time could ever come when they should be like an old song learned in life's happier day, and whose memory has been treasured, to make us weep in the years when the heart has need to be soothed by weeping; if there would ever be a day when thy name might be sounded in mine ear as the name of a stranger! And that day has long since come,—
"For whispering tongues will poison truth."
How truly may we be said to live but in the past and in the future,—to have our hearts made up of memory and of hope, for which the present becomes, hour after hour, more and more of a void! And alas! is it not true, as a consequence, that the more they are occupied with memory, the less room have they for hope? And thus the one is ever gaining upon the other, and the dark waters of memory are hourly spreading upon that shore where hope had room to build her edifices and to play about them, till at length they cover all, and hope, having "no rest for the sole of her foot," flies forward to a higher and a better shore!
And such are my visions of the mistletoe; these are amongst the spirits that rise up to wait upon my memory,—"they and the other spirits" of the mystic bough! But brighter fancies has that charmed branch for many of our readers, and merrier spirits hide amid its leaves. Many a pleasant tale could we tell of the mistletoe-bough which might amuse our readers more than the descriptions to which we are confined, if the limits of our volume would permit. But already our space is scarcely sufficient for our purpose. We think we can promise our readers in another volume a series of tales connected with the traditions and superstitions which are detailed in the present, and which may serve as illustrations of the customs of the Christmas-tide.
Some of the names by which this remarkable plant were formerly called are, "misselden," "misseldine," and, more commonly, "missel." Old Tusser tells us that,—
"If snow do continue, sheep hardly that fare,
Crave mistle and ivy;"
and Archdeacon Nares says "the missel-thrush" is so designated "from feeding on its berries." From the generality of the examples in which this plant is mentioned by the name of "missel," it is suggested to us, by Mr. Crofton Croker that the additional syllable given to the name now in common use is a corruption of the old tod, and that mistletoe, or mistletod, implies a bush, or bunch, of missel, such as is commonly hung up at Christmas. He quotes in support of this suggestion the corresponding phrase of "ivy-tod," which occurs frequently in the writings of the Elizabethan age. If this be so, the expression "the mistletoe-bough" includes a tautology; but as it is popularly used, we retain it for the instruction of such antiquarians of remote future times as may consult our pages for some account of the good old customs which are disappearing so fast, and may fail to reach their day.