180 LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 



light and delicate waving foliage ; picturesque in its singular 

 and characteristic form ; and beautiful in the flowing lines 

 formed by its drooping branches, as well as in the melan- 

 choly, poetical, and scriptural associations connected with it. 

 Every one will call to mind the captivity of the children of 

 Israel, as connected with this tree : " By the waters of Baby- 

 lon we sat down and wept, O Zion ! As for our harps, we 

 hanged them upon the willow trees :" Psalm cxxxvii. And 

 the gentle sigh of the faintest breeze through its light foliage, 

 still recalls to the mind of the imaginative, the plaintive mur- 

 mur of those abandoned harps, which one may fancy to have 

 bequeathed their last tones of music to its pensile branches. 



Since that period, the willow appears to have been more or 

 less consecrated to a tender sentiment of sfrief, 



" Trailing low its boughs, to hide 

 The gleaming marble.'' 



To these offices of pensive melancholy, it appears to be ded- 

 icated in almost all countries. The Chinese and other Asi- 

 atic nations, and the Turks, as well as the enlightened Eu- 

 ropeans, universally plant it in their cemeteries and last 

 places of repose. A French writer thus speaks of it, in con- 

 trasting its merits for those purposes, with the cypress. " The 

 cypress was long considered as the appropriate ornament of 

 the cemetery ; but its gloomy shade among the tombs, and 

 its thick, hea\'y foliage, of the darkest green, inspire only 

 depressing thoughts, and present the image of death under 

 its most appalling form. The Weeping willow, on the con- 

 trary, rather conveys a picture of grief for the loss of the depart- 

 ed, than of the darkness of the grave. Its light and elegant 

 foliage, flows like the dishevelled hair and graceful drapery 

 of a sculptured mourner over a sepulchral urn ; and conveys 



