ts of Europe. The rose is gone, but the perfume still
lingers in the old leaves of the manuscript. And the reader who
comprehends this may also comprehend the tender affection for the Ivy
expressed in the old Christmas carols which I have quoted, and which,
without such comprehension, seem absurd enough; while _with_ it, they
appear truly beautiful and touching.

As the symbol of a joyous faith, the Ivy seems to have been especially
repugnant to the Hebrews, whose stern monotheism admitted few attributes
to the Deity save those of tremendous power, vengeance, and gloom. So we
find (_Maccabees_, book ii., c. 6., v. 7) that it was regarded by them
as most horrible that, 'in the day of the king's birth, every month,
they were brought, by bitter constraint, to eat of the sacrifices; and,
when the feast of Bacchus was kept, the Jews were compelled to go in
procession to Bacchus, carrying Ivy.' A dislike to this emblem of
heathen joy seems, however, to have clung to them through all changes of
faith--a fact apparently well known to Ptolemy Philopater, king of
Egypt, who ordered that all the Jewish renegades who had abjured their
religion should be branded with an Ivy-leaf.

When the reader who may be interested in the architecture of the middle
ages meets in its tracery, as he often must, the Ivy-leaf, let him
recall that here is a symbol which was not used unthinkingly by the Free
Masons, who seldom lost an opportunity to bring forward their orientally
derived Nature-lore. In fact, the whole mass and body of mediaeval
architectural emblems presents nothing less than a protest of Nature and
life, independence and intelligence, knowledge and joyousness, against
the gloomy prison of form and tyranny which held Truth in chains. The
stone Ivy-leaf carved on the capitals of old cathedrals was as reviving
a symbol to the heart of the Initiated as was the living Ivy on the
walls without, green and beautiful among mid-winter's snow. It has been
well conjectured by a German writer (STIEGLITZ, _Archaeologie der
Baukunst der Griechen und Roemer_, Weimar, 1801, I _Theil_, Sec. 268), that
the relation of the Ivy to Bacchus was probably the cause why it was so
frequently introduced by the Greeks among the architectural ornaments of
their temples; a very natural conjecture, when we remember that it was a
firm conviction in the early faith, even of India, that where the Ivy
was found, the god had literally been. The same bold spirit of tradi