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LEAVES FROM OLD TREES.

[Revised and reprinted from the New Monthly Magazine, Oct. 1856.]

FROM the earliest ages trees occur as objects reverenced from generation to generation, and with particular trees many memorable events of history are associated. In the most ancient annals we find mention of some tree that became a landmark of nations long before Ethelbert and his court listened to the preaching of St. Augustine beneath a Kentish oak; and it seems as if the human race had in all times loved to connect the memories of transitory man with these enduring witnesses, and to hold as consecrate their ancient solemn shade.

The towering oaks of Palestine mark each step of the first patriarchal migration.* Under the oak of Moreh, at Shechem, and the oak of Mamre, at Hebron, was built the altar and pitched the tent of Abraham; † and each of these aged trees connected with the history of Israel became the centre of a long succession of traditionary memories and historical recollection :

Such tents the patriarchs loved.

Within the ancient inclosure mentioned by Josephus, of which some ruins still remain to the north of Hebron under the name of "Abraham's House," stood a gigantic tree, supposed not only to have seen the Flood, but to be coeval with the Creation! The tree to which this marvellous antiquity was attributed remained

* Sinaï and Palestine. By the Rev. A. P. Stanley.

1856.

† Ven. Bede, in his Op. Hist. Min. (Book of the Holy Places, chap. ix.), mentions Abraham's Oak as reduced to a stump twice the height of a man, inclosed in a church and situated in the northern part of the plain of Mamre.

down to the time of Theodosius, and in the reign of Constantine its branches were commonly hung with images and a picture, and a fair was held under its shade, at which time Christians, Jews, and Arabs alike rendered honour to the leafy patriarch. This Methuselah of trees was afterwards inclosed within a church, in which it was standing in the seventh century, and marvellous tales were told of it. Another tree, known as the Oak of Abraham, near Hebron, is described by Dr. Robinson as a magnificent tree, with a sound trunk measuring twenty-two feet and a half in circumference, the branches having a diameter of nearly ninety feet; but he remarks that Abraham's tree (a terebinth) probably stood nearer to Jerusalem, and it had disappeared in the days of Jerome. An oak at El Kantarah, near Sidon, measures forty feet in circumference-a girth which exceeds that of the Hebron oak by more than fifteen feet.* Maundeville relates of a tree which he saw near Hebron, that it was green in Abraham's day, and withered up at the time of Our Saviour's crucifixion. This is not the only tree to which popular tradition has ascribed a sympathy with the life of Christ, for the oak in the New Forest, against which Tyrrel's arrow glanced (and which was standing a hundred years ago), was said to put forth buds every Christmasday that withered before night. There were other sylvan patriarchs of fame in the Holy Land, as the Oak of Bethel, the Oaks of the Wanderers, &c., which look green in the history of Palestine, like the palm-trees of its wells. And we must not omit the sycamore, from which Zaccheus saw Our Saviour's entry into Jerusalem, which was standing in the fourth century after Christ, when it was seen by St. Jerome.

Then, besides these long-remembered landmarks, there is the cluster of ancient trees that remain in their secluded heights on Lebanon, celebrated by the poets of Israel as the Trees of Godthe tall cedars which He had planted. A Syrian traveller, in 1696, found one of the largest thirty-seven feet in girth. Their extreme antiquity is proverbial. Their timber was used (and probably for the last time) in Constantine's Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem, the roof of which, when last renewed, was repaired

*It is mentioned by Mr. Beamont of Warrington, in his Diary of a Visit to the East, 1856.

with British oak, the gift of our fourth Edward. The Greek clergy still offer mass under their branches as in a natural temple. And so, upon the ridge of Carmel, in the ruins of a stone building which might be of any age, among thick bushes of dwarf oak, the reputed scene of Elijah's sacrifice upon the sacred high-altar of the Lord, the Druses come-as Vespasian went to offer sacrifice.

But long before the Druses were a people, woods and groves were held in reverence by heathen antiquity for the celebration of religious rites. We have all read of the solemn shades

Where maidens to the Queen of Heaven

Wove the gay dance round oak or palm.

Homer mentions a sacrifice offered under a beautiful plane-tree. Ulysses, inquiring for his son, hears that

In sacred groves celestial rites he pays.

The oak, which was held sacred by the Greeks, was dedicated to Jupiter himself by the Romans, was reverenced by the Britons, and (as we learn from Diodorus Siculus †) by the Gauls. Pliny‡ says, that to the sacred shade of oaks the Druids resorted for their solemn ceremonies. Then-to pass from heathen customs to the usages of Christian antiquity—we find that to hold a synod under the shade of an oak-tree was a custom of which early ecclesiastical history furnishes many examples. Thus, the place where Augustine convoked his first synod, and met the ecclesiastics of the British Church, was afterwards distinguished by the name of 'Augustine's Oak." It seems to have been near Aust-ferry, at the extremity of Gloucestershire, in Bede's time part of the kingdom of the West Saxons. The name of Augustine is, moreover, connected with more than one oak in England.

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A custom of very distant antiquity was followed by those mediæval princes who received embassies, and-like St. Louisdispensed justice, sitting under a wide-spreading ancient tree.

* Odyss. xi. 223. † Diod. Sic. b. v. c. 31. Plin. Nat. Hist. xvi. c. 44. "Jam per se Roborum eligunt Lucos, neque ulla sacra sine eâ fronde conficiunt."

E

And well might the heathen rites of antiquity be performed within the awe-inspiring shade of dark and solemn forests; well might the Gospel of the Eternal be proclaimed beneath His ancient and wide-embracing oaks; well might a Christian sovereign hold his court surrounded by such monitory and steadfast nobles, and take counsel from the "tongues in trees." Remembering those who had there preceded him in judgment, he might feel that "centuries were looking down" upon him from the towering branches, and he might be admonished, by the magnitude and stability of these crowned ones of the forest, to contrast with them the littleness of man, and with their vigorous duration the evanescence of human sway. But we are not going to moralise on trees: let us revert to the notices of trees in ancient history. And first, there was the plane-tree, famous for its extraordinary size and beauty, which grew in Arcadia, and was said to have been planted by the husband of Helen, and which Pausanias saw when it was supposed to be thirteen hundred years old, being then still vigorous. The temple of Apollo in the Peloponnesus stood among plane-trees. Pliny mentions the famous plane-tree of Lycia, which grew near a fountain by the highway, itself a forest, and in the hollow of whose trunk the Roman governor, Licinius Mucianus, with eighteen companions, enjoyed a repast. Enormous plane-trees are mentioned in the earliest records of Greece. It was probably under their shade that Socrates conversed of philosophy; and the Academic groves in which the mind loves to picture Plato and his disciples were formed of the lofty and wide-spreading plane. We learn from Herodotus that Xerxes, when he invaded Greece, halted his army under a tree of this kind, which delighted him by its spreading shade and colossal form; and Elian says that the Persian king spent a whole day under it, and commemorated it in a medal which he caused to be struck. A tree like a sycamore, equally capable of sheltering an army, was seen, in 1656, by Thevenot on the Turkish island called Isola Longa, the branches of which, he says, would cover two thousand men! Down to later days magnificent specimens of this umbrageous tree have continued to flourish in Greece, many of which are now existing. One of the most celebrated of these is the gigantic "Plane-tree of Godfrey de Bouillon," at

Buyuk-dere on the European side of the Bosphorus—a tree that was flourishing when first

Byzantium's native sign

Of Cross on Crescent was unfurled,

and is conjectured by M. de Candolle to be more than two thousand years old. When measured in 1831, it was found to be a hundred and forty feet in circumference at the base, and it has been described * as resembling a tower of clustered trunks. Its branches are said to be more like a forest than a single tree. Its sides are cavernous, and shelter the herdsmen as in a grotto, who make their fires in these hollows. It is picturesque and majestic in its aspect, as a tree should be over whose masses of foliage centuries have glided, and which has shadowed the tents of heroes that Tasso sung. Whether it was Godfrey himself or his fellow crusaders who encamped beneath this millennial tree, there it stands, ever full of nests and sunbeams, seeing the years depart like the leaves that fall at its feet, and the winds of the desert scatter the dust of those antique warriors, remaining itself, from age to age, only more firm and colossal.

Another enormous plane, growing upon the banks of the Selinus, near Nostizza, is mentioned in Hobhouse's "Travels in Albania," and is described as being forty-five feet in circumference at the base, and a hundred feet high, covered with luxuriant foliage. In the Turkish Empire these ancient trees seem to be held in reverence as they were before the days of the Prophet. The Mahomedans retire to pray and meditate under them, selecting those beneath whose shade religious men in former days are believed to have meditated and prayed.

But we were speaking of trees mentioned in history; and. perhaps one of the most remarkable is the tree called Ruminalis,† which stood in the place assigned for public elections in Rome. Tacitus informs us that in A.D. 58 this tree, which eight hun

* By Monsieur Gautier, in his "Constantinople of To-Day."

From the word (in old Latin) rumen. Thus, in Pliny, "Lupa infantibus præbens rumen.”

Annals, book xiii. sec. 58.

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