[259].
It looks as if this carol—of Henry VI.'s reign—was once a singing game: On the one side in the blaze of the Yule Log the Holly men with gilded and garlanded pole; and on the other Ivy with her maidens; each side taunting the other, and maybe tugging for prisoners. "Ivy-girls," too, used to be burned by companies of boys, and Holly-boys by girls—all yawping and jodelling at the sport.
"Poppynguy" may perhaps be the jay, but it would be pleasanter company for the lark, if here it means the green woodpecker. His other names are rain-bird, hew-hole, wood-sprite, woodweele, woodspeek and yaffle, the very sound of which is like the echo of his own laughter in the sunny green tops of the wood.
[260]. "When Isicles hang by the Wall."
There is a peculiar magic (which may perhaps be less apparent to the Greenlanders) in icicles. Nor are its effects unknown to the four-footed. In certain remote regions of Siberia there is said to be a little animal called the Iccė-vulff (or Ice-wolf). He has prick-ears, is a fierce feeder, and wears a coat so wondrous close and dense that three or four of our English moles' skins laid one atop the other would yet fall short of its match. But he seldom attains to a ripe age, and for this reason. As soon as he is freed from his dam's snow-burrow, he hastes off to the dwellings of the men of those parts, snuffing their dried seal-steaks and blubber, being a most incorrigible thief and a very wary. And such is his craft that he mocks at gins, traps and pitfalls. But he has a habit which is often to his undoing. It is in this wise: The heat of these hovels is apt to melt a little the snow upon them, its water trickling and coursing softly down till long, keen icicles are formed, upon which, whether hungry or fed, taking up his station in a plumb line beneath them, he will squat and gloat for an hour together, having a marvellous greedy pleasure in clear glasslike colours. Hearing his breathing or faint snuffing, any human who wakes within will of a sudden violently shake the wall between. This dislodges the pendent icicles, and the squatting Iccė-vulff is pierced to his death as with a sword.
Winter indeed makes crystal even of ink. It has the power of enchanting every imagination; and particularly Coleridge's:
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch