My Garden in Spring 



seat under this one to review some of them. The use of 

 the Willow as an emblem of grief is older than the intro- 

 duction of the weeping variety, for most of our older 

 English poets have connected the ordinary Willow with 

 sorrow, and especially that of forsaken lovers. Shakespeare 

 writes of it in connection with grief at least eight times ; 

 and Ophelia fell into the stream when endeavouring to 

 hang her garland on a Willow. Was it then on account 

 of the wailing sound of the English name, or, as some 

 think, did the literary association arise from the Bible 

 translation of the hundred and thirty-seventh Psalm : 

 " By the waters of Babylon we sat down ; yea, we wept 

 when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon 

 the Willows in the midst thereof " ? This latter seems 

 the most likely explanation I have met with. It has 

 frequently been asserted that the Willow growing along 

 the banks of the Euphrates is actually this Weeping Willow, 

 and on that account its scientific name is Salix babylonica. 

 Linnaeus certainly gave it the name under this impression, 

 and I must own to a feeling of disappointment in having to 

 bow to such great authorities as Messrs. Elwes and Henry, 

 who declare in their great joint work that the trees of that 

 Psalm are Populus euphratica, and that this Willow does 

 not occur now in Babylonia, and its original home is 

 Central and Southern China. But if this fond old belief 

 has to be abandoned, it is pleasant to have this tree thus 

 surely connected with the familiar one on the Willow 

 Pattern plates that has provided the name for that cele- 

 brated Chinese landscape design, in spite of the fact that 

 the acrobatic pair of forky-tailed birds and the wonderfully 

 fertile apple tree that bears such a crop of fruit without 

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