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Arthur Severn, a famous raconteur, whose description of the adventures of their cruise upon wheels includes so bright a picture of Ruskin, that I must use his words as they were reported on the occasion in the magazine Igdrasil: "... With the Professor, who dislikes railways very much, it was not a question of travelling by rail.
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.
Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? Bow thy head, O Buddha! and do thou, O Zoroaster! hang thy head. Isis and Osiris grow dim; Jove nods in heaven; the pipe of Pan is dumb; Thor is silent in the northern Aurora; the tree of Igdrasil waves in midnight; Confucius is pale; Muhammad is dust. Darkness is over the skirts of the gods of the past gloom receives them, Erebus holds outstretched arms.
When the Northern nations became Christian they transferred to the Cross the nobler ideas embodied in the mystic tree Igdrasil; and one of the commonest ideas of the mystical writers of the Middle Ages is the identification of the Cross as both the true tree of life and the true tree of knowledge. In the last chapter we saw the Son of Man nailed to the cursed tree.
He was like a man who, with intent to dig up a pine, found himself tugging at the roots of an Igdrasil that twined themselves under a whole Hercynian forest. His constant cries of positive pain in the progress of the work are distressing, as his indomitable determination to wrestle with and prevail over it is inspiring.
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