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Igdrasil, the Ash-tree of Existence, has its roots deep down in the kingdoms of Hela or Death; its trunk reaches up heaven-high, spreads its boughs over the whole Universe: it is the Tree of Existence. At the foot of it, in the Death-kingdom, sit Three Nornas, Fates, the Past, Present, Future; watering its roots from the Sacred Well.
But indeed that strange outbudding of our whole English Existence, which we call the Elizabethan Era, did not it too come as of its own accord? The "Tree Igdrasil" buds and withers by its own laws, too deep for our scanning. Yet it does bud and wither, and every bough and leaf of it is there, by fixed eternal laws; not a Sir Thomas Lucy but comes at the hour fit for him.
The living TREE Igdrasil, with the melodious prophetic waving of its world-wide boughs, deep-rooted as Hela, has died out into the clanking of a World-MACHINE. "Tree" and "Machine:" contrast these two things. I, for my share, declare the world to be no machine!
It is all a Tree: circulation of sap and influences, mutual communication of every minutest leaf with the lowest talon of a root, with every other greatest and minutest portion of the whole. The Tree Igdrasil, that has its roots down in the Kingdoms of Hela and Death, and whose boughs overspread the highest Heaven!
By Henry J. Macdonald, late of Corpus-Christi College, Oxford. New York. Rudd & Carleton. 12mo. pp. 318. $1.00. Igdrasil; or the Tree of Existence. By James Challen. Philadelphia. Lindsay & Blakiston. 12mo. pp. 170. $1.00. Life of Mahomet. By Edward Gibbon. New York. Delisser & Proctor. 16mo. pp. 236. 50 cts. Proverbial and Moral Thoughts. In a Series of Essays. By Charles Henry Hanger. Boston.
Is it conceivable that Shakspere, who, as most people admit, was a man of some poetic feeling, being in possession of the beautiful Norn-legend the silent Fate-goddesses sitting at the foot of Igdrasil, the mysterious tree of human existence, and watering its roots with water from the sacred spring could, ruthlessly and without cause, mar the charm of the legend by the gratuitous introduction of the gross and primarily unpoetical details incident to the practice of witchcraft?
What a Hyper-Brobdignagian business! Untamed Thought, great, giantlike, enormous; to be tamed in due time into the compact greatness, not giantlike, but godlike and stronger than gianthood, of the Shakspeares, the Goethes! Spiritually as well as bodily these men are our progenitors. I like, too, that representation they have of the tree Igdrasil. All Life is figured by them as a Tree.
It is all a Tree: circulation of sap and influences, mutual communication of every minutest leaf with the lowest talon of a root, with every other greatest and minutest portion of the whole. The Tree Igdrasil, that has its roots down in the Kingdoms of Hela and Death, and whose boughs overspread the highest Heaven !
In 1887 the Ruskin Reading Guild was formed in Scotland, with many local branches in England and Ireland, and a journal, subsequently re-named Igdrasil, to promote study of literary and social subjects in Ruskin, and in writers like Carlyle and Tolstoi taking a standpoint similar to his. In 1896, Ruskin Societies were formed at Birmingham and in the Isle of Man.
It grows there, the breath of Human Passion rustling through it; or storm tost, the storm-wind howling through it like the voice of all the gods. It is Igdrasil, the Tree of Existence. It is the past, the present, and the future; what was done, what is doing, what will be done; "the infinite conjugation of the verb To do."