I will tell it softly,
Yond Crickets shall not heare it.
Hermione.Come on then, and giv't me in mine eare....
The Winter's Tale
[429]. "That birk Grew fair eneugh." (stanza 6)
The strangest feature of these ballads is that the stories they tell, the customs, beliefs, lore they refer to, may be found scattered up and down all over the world. In Russia, for one small instance, the birk or birch tree is honoured in this fashion: A little before Whitsuntide, says Sir James Fraser in The Golden Bough, the young women, with dancing and feasting, cut down a living birch-tree, deck it with bright clothes or hang it with ribbons; then set it up as an honoured guest in one of the village houses. On Whit Sunday itself they fling it, finery and all, into a stream for a charm.
And now for England: "Thirty years ago," says Mrs. Wright, "it was still customary in some west-Midland districts to decorate village churches on Whit Sunday with sprigs of birch stuck in holes bored in the tops of the pews. I can remember this being done by an old village clerk in Herefordshire, but when he was gathered to his fathers in the same profession, the custom died with him." How happy must he have been then—as happy as for that one evening was the Wife of Usher's Well herself—to lift his eyes upon a silver birch brushing with its green tresses the very gates of Paradise!
[433]. "A spangle here."
Dew sate on Julia's haire,
And spangled too,