DECIDUOUS ORNAMENTAL TREES. 
213 
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 the plaintive murmur 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 grief, 
“ Trailing low its boughs, to hide 
The gleaming marble.” 
To these offices of pensive melancholy, it appears to be 
dedicated in almost all countries. The Chinese and other 
Asiatic nations, and the Turks, as well as the enlightened 
Europeans, universally plant it in their cemeteries and last 
places of repose. A French writer thus speaks of it, in 
contrasting its merits for those purposes, with the cypress. 
11 The cypress was long considered aS the appropriate orna- 
ment of the cemetry ; but its gloomy shade among the 
tombs, and its thick, heavy foliage, of the darkest green, 
inspire only depressing thoughts, and present the image of 
death under its most appalling form. The Weeping wil- 
low, on the contrary, rather conveys a picture of grief for 
the loss of the departed, 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 sepul- 
chral urn ; and conveys those soothing, though softly 
melancholy reflections, which have made one of our poets 
to exclaim, ‘ There is a pleasure even in grief.”’* On this 
passage, Loudon remarks : “ Notwithstanding the prefe- 
* Poiteau, Noveau du Hamel, 
