214 
ARBOR DA Y MANUAL. 
UNDER THE PALMS. 
I KNEW a palm tree upon Capri. It stood in select society of shining fig 
I leaves and lustrous oleanders; it overhung the balcony, and so looked, 
far overleaning, down upon the blue Mediterranean. Through the dream-mists 
of southern Italian noons it looked up the broad bay of Naples and saw vague 
Vesuvius melting away; or at sunset the isles of the Sirens, whereon they singing 
sat, and wooed Ulysses as he sailed by. From the Sorrento, where Tasso was 
born, it looked across to pleasant Posilippo, where Virgil is buried, and to 
stately Ischia. The palm of Capri saw all that was fairest and most famous in 
the Bay of Naples. 
The palm'was a poet,— as ail palms are poets. When I asked a bard whom 
I knew what the palm tree sang in its melancholy measures of waving, he told 
me that not Vesuvius, nor the Sirens, nor Sorrento, nor Tasso, nor Virgil, 
nor stately Ischia, nor all the broad blue beauty of Naples bay, was the 
theme of that singing. But partly it sang of a river forever flowing, and of 
cloudless skies, and green fields that never faded, and the mournful music of 
water-wheels, and the wild monotony of a tropical life,— and partly of the yel¬ 
low silence of the desert and of drear solitudes inaccessible, and of wandering 
caravans, and lonely men. 
Then it sang of gardens overhanging rivers that roll gorgeous-shored through 
western fancies of gardens in Bagdad watered by the Euphrates and the Tigris 
whereof it was the fringe and darling ornament, of oases in those sere sad deserts, 
where it over-fountained fountains, and every leaf was blessed; more than all, 
it sang of the great Orient universally, where no other tree was so abundant, so 
loved, and so beautiful. 
Palm branches were strewn before Jesus as he rode into Jerusalem, and for¬ 
ever, since, the palm symbolizes peace. Wherever a grove of palms waves in 
the low moonlight or starlight wind, it is the celestial choir chanting “ peace on 
earth, good will to men.” Therefore it is the foliage of the old religious pictures. 
Mary sits under a palm, and the saints converse under palms, and the prophets 
prophesy in their shade, and cherubs float with palms over the martyr’s agony. 
Nor among pictures is there any more beautiful than Corregio’s “ Flight into 
Egypt,” wherein the golden-haired angels put aside the palm branches, and smile 
sunnily through upon the lovely mother and the lovely child. 
The palm is the chief tree in religious remembrance and religious art. It is 
the chief tree in romance and poetry. But its sentiment is always eastern, and 
it always yearns for the east. In the west it is an exile, and pines in the most 
sheltered gardens. Yet of all western shores it is the happiest in Sicily' - ; for 
Sicily is only a bit of Africa drifted westward. There is a soft southern strain 
in the Sicilian skies, and the palms drink its sunshine like dew. Upon the 
tropical plain behind Palermo, among the sun-sucking aloes, and the thick, 
shapeless cactuses, like elephants and rhinoceroses enchanted into foliage, it 
grows ever gladly. For the aloe is of the east, and the prickly pear ; and upon 
the Sicilian plain the Saracens have been, and the palm sees the Arabian arch, 
and the oriental sign-manual stamped upon the land. 
