ydian hero Tylon, where a
serpent is the intermediary--and serpents are often credited with a
knowledge of life-giving plants,--reference is made to a _golden_
flower.[19] This may possibly be connected with the idea of the
life-giving power of the god, since the golden flower is dedicated to
Zeus. Professor J. G. Frazer thinks that a red flower may perhaps have
been chosen to suggest a flow of blood--an infusion of fresh life into
the veins of the dead. It is also possible that red and yellow may
have been interchangeable terms, just as they are to-day amongst the
Italian peasantry. The choice of colour may, however, have been
derived from the red anemone, which is said to have sprung from the
blood of Adonis, with whom love and life are traditionally associated.
There are some, on the other hand, who ascribe to the story a deep
spiritual meaning. With them it is not the flower itself which brings
about resurrection from apparent death, but the spiritual truth of
which the flower is but the outward symbol. It may be that the red
blossom represents the joys of earth which Eliduc's wife voluntarily
renounces, and which, surrendered to her rival, in time became like a
burning thing whose fiery touch awakens to life the sleeping
conscience. In a story such as this, which has evidently travelled far
and wide before we find it in England in the eleventh century, it is
possible that any or all of these surmises may be true. The whole of
this incident of the weasel and the flower, read in the original, is
of extraordinary interest and beauty. What a touching picture of
animal sensibility is the account of the despair of the weasel on
finding its dead mate, and its tender display of solicitude and
sympathy, raising the lifeless head and trying to reanimate the small
inert body! Only one who loved animals and knew their habits well
could have told thus tenderly and graphically a story so simple, yet
so suggestive, of the love of two sentient things, a love which runs
like a thread of gold through all creation and makes it one.

[19] J. G. Frazer, _Adonis, Attis, Osiris_, p. 98.

The twelfth century was an age of humanism as well as feudalism. As
often happens in times of comparative peace, a growth of interest in
the individual was springing up and finding expression in lyric poetry
and stories. The day of epics was waning. Those vast and involved
poems, like to huge and complex frescoes, found little favour at a
time when