Thus Ovid 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 oncea 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!

Oh, listen to the Hamadryad's prayer!

One fell lame shortly after; soon after each of the others lost an eye, and he that felled the tree, though warned of these misfortunes of the other men, would, notwithstanding, adventure to do it, and shortly afterwards broke his leg; as if the Hamadryads had resolved to take an ample revenge for the injury done to their venerable and sacred oak."

Their lives, like those of the Hamadryads, are attached to the trees; and "if any one causes by friction the inner bark to loosen a Wood-woman dies.

The lucky seer or poet who struck out the fancy would soon find imitators; and it would become, after a while, a common and popular superstition that Hamadryads haunted the hollow forest trees, Naiads the wells, and Oreads the lawns.

In the latter volume, The Hellenics,which included some translations of his earlier Latin poems, called Idyllia Heroica,one has only to read "The Hamadryad," and compare it with the lyrics of the first volume, in order to realize the astonishing literary vigor of a man who published two volumes, a half century apart, without any appreciable diminution of poetical feeling.

By this means small poets have such a stock of able hard words lying by them, as dryads, hamadryads, Aonides, fauni, nymphae, sylvani, &c., that signify nothing at all, and such a world of pedantic terms of the same kind, as may serve to furnish all the new inventions and thorough reformations that can happen between this and Plato's great year.

Evelyn, in his book of Forest Trees, tells us of wicked men that cut down trees, and never prospered afterwards; yet nothing has deterred these audacious aldermen from violating the Hamadryads of George lane.

In many places they were the primeval forests of Olympus, and the Hamadryads were not yet frightened from their haunts.

Leslie Goldthwaite, in the hamadryad costume, just awarewhich it was impossible for her to helpof its exceeding prettiness, and of glances that recognized it, pleased with a mixture of pleasures, was on the surface of things once more, taking the delight of the moment with a young girl's innocent abandonment.

But for the cathedral-builder, Dryads and Hamadryads, Oreads, Fauns, and Naiads did not exist,the Oak of Dodona uttered no oracles.

Never did our sylvan sojourn look so fair as when we quitted it, and seemed to see among the streaming sunbeams in the shadows the Hamadryads of the spot returned, and waving us adieux.

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car? And driven the Hamadryad from the wood To seek a shelter in some happier star?

He tried to reconstruct from the victim of three-and-sixty years the pink-slippered hamadryad who had haunted him all his life.

He leaned over, and administered with his bare hand a vicious dig to a magnificent hamadryad, that lay coiled upon itself in its open basket.

The woodcutter did not cut down so many trees a day, that the hamadryads had not time to make their plaints heard; the shepherd tended his sheep, and did no jobs or chores the while; the idyl had a chance to grow up, and modulate his oaten pipe.

Knights, squires, wizards, hamadryads, satyrs, and river gods, Idleness, Gluttony, and Superstition jostle each other in Spenser's fairy land.

What if he has taken root like a hamadryad?" "Poor fellow!" said Daphnè, in the simplest tone in the world; "he looks very dull all by himself.

A couple of years ago I was informed of a case where one of these king-snakes was put into an enclosure with an Indian snake- eating cobra or hamadryad of about the same size.

It would be interesting to find out if the hamadryad is afraid to prey on all pit-vipers, and also whether it will prey on its small relative, the true cobrafor it may well be that, even if not immune to the viper poison, it is immune to the poison of its close ally, the smaller cobra.

The common Opinion concerning the Nymphs, whom the Ancients called Hamadryads, is more to the Honour of Trees than any thing yet mentioned.

HAMADRYAD, a wood-nymph identified with a particular tree that was born with it and that died with it.

Certainly nobody; but if this marble is transformed by the hand of a Phidias or a Praxiteles, and if it then presents to our eyes the form of a Nereid with flowing hair, or a hamadryad with graceful body, buyers will not be wanting.

It was thus that the ancients believed that the dryads, hamadryads, satyrs, pans, nereids, watched over the fountains, forests, and seas, attributing to each force in nature a presiding divinity.