On the other hand, we must not confound the spiritual vitality ascribed to trees with the animistic conception of their being inhabited by certain spirits, although, as Mr. Tylor[16] remarks, it is difficult at times to distinguish between the two notions.  Instances of these tree spirits lie thickly scattered throughout the folk-lore of most countries, survivals of which remain even amongst cultured races.  It is interesting, moreover, to trace the same idea in Greek and Roman mythology.  Thus Ovid[17] tells a beautiful story of Erisicthon’s impious attack on the grove of Ceres, and it may be remembered how the Greek dryads and hamadryads had their life linked to a tree, and, “as this withers and dies, they themselves fall away and cease to be; any injury to bough or twig is felt as a wound, and a wholesale hewing down puts an end to them at once—­a cry of anguish escapes them when the cruel axe comes near.”

In “Apollonius Rhodius” we find one of these hamadryads imploring a woodman to spare a tree to which her existence is attached: 

  “Loud through the air resounds the woodman’s stroke,
  When, lo! a voice breaks from the groaning oak,
  ’Spare, spare my life! a trembling virgin spare! 
  Oh, listen to the Hamadryad’s prayer! 
  No longer let that fearful axe resound;
  Preserve the tree to which my life is bound. 
  See, from the bark my blood in torrents flows;
  I faint, I sink, I perish from your blows.’”

Aubrey, referring to this old superstition, says: 

“I cannot omit taking notice of the great misfortune in the family of the Earl of Winchelsea, who at Eastwell, in Kent, felled down a most curious grove of oaks, near his own noble seat, and gave the first blow with his own hands.  Shortly after his countess died in her bed suddenly, and his eldest son, the Lord Maidstone, was killed at sea by a cannon bullet.”

Modern European folk-lore still provides us with a curious variety of these spirit-haunted trees, and hence when the alder is hewn, “it bleeds, weeps, and begins to speak.[18]” An old tree in the Rugaard forest must not be felled for an elf dwells within, and another, on the Heinzenberg, near Zell, “uttered a complaint when the woodman cut it down, for in it was our Lady, whose chapel now stands upon the spot."[19]

An Austrian Maerchen tells of a stately fir, in which there sits a fairy maiden waited on by dwarfs, rewarding the innocent and plaguing the guilty; and there is the German song of the maiden in the pine, whose bark the boy splits with a gold and silver horn.  Stories again are circulated in Sweden, among the peasantry, of persons who by cutting a branch from a habitation tree have been struck with death.  Such a tree was the “klinta tall” in Westmanland, under which a mermaid was said to dwell.  To this tree might occasionally be seen snow-white cattle driven up from the neighbouring lake across the meadows.