Weeping Willow. 
89 
The author of the “ Essay on Man ” should know something 
about the lachrymal tree, as, according to popular tradition, he 
raised the first known specimen of it in England. Martyn 
relates the story thus: 
“ The famous and admired weeping willow planted by Pope, 
which has since been felled to the ground, came from Spain, 
enclosing a present for Lady Suffolk. Pope was present when 
the covering was taken off; he observed that the pieces of stick 
appeared as if they had some vegetation, and added, ‘ Perhaps 
they may produce something we have not in England.’ Under 
this idea, he planted it in his garden, and it produced the 
willow-tree that has given birth to so many others.” 
According to this same authority, this progenitor of so many 
lovely offspring, and which had only reached its fourteenth 
year when the poet died, was cut down by order of its owner, 
in order to put an end to the annoyance she experienced 
from the numberless applicants for cuttings of the precious 
relic, or even for a view of it. It is sad that so interesting a 
tree could not have been suffered to perish by the hand of 
time: that was indeed a tree the woodman should have 
spared! 
Linnaeus named this tree Salix Babylonica, or Willow of 
Babylon, in allusion to an affecting passage in the hundred 
and thirty-seventh Psalm, where the captive children of Israel 
are represented as hanging their harps upon the willows by the 
rivers of Babylon, where they sat down and wept at the re¬ 
membrance of their native land, and at the request of their 
captors that they should sing unto them one of the songs of 
Zion; for, as the Psalmist makes them so pathetically cry, 
“ How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land ?” 
In his “ Hebrew Melodies,” Byron has bequeathed us two 
passionate poems, suggested by this song of the royal minstrel. 
The following is the most appropriate here : 
• “ We sat down and wept by the waters 
Of Babel, and thought of the day 
When our foe, in the hue of his slaughters, 
Made Salem’s high places his prey; 
And ye, O her desolate daughters! 
Were scattered all weeping away. 
“While sadly we gazed on the river, 
Which rolled on in freedom below, 
