is curious connection of the Willow with forsaken or
disappointed lovers stood its ground for a long time. Spenser spoke of
the "Willow worne of forlorne paramoures." Drayton says that--

"In love the sad forsaken wight
The Willow garland weareth"--

_Muse's Elysium._

and though we have long given up the custom of wearing garlands of any
sort, yet many of us can recollect one of the most popular street songs,
that was heard everywhere, and at last passed into a proverb, and which
began--

"All round my hat I vears a green Willow
In token," &c.

It has been suggested by many that this melancholy association with the
Willow arose from its Biblical associations; and this may be so, though
all the references to the Willow that occur in the Bible are, with one
notable exception, connected with joyfulness and fertility. The one
exception is the plaintive wail in the 137th Psalm--

"By the streams of Babel, there we sat down,
And we wept when we remembered Zion.
On the Willows among the rivers we hung our harps."

And this one record has been sufficient to alter the emblematic
character of the Willow--"this one incident has made the Willow an
emblem of the deepest of sorrows, namely, sorrow for sin found out, and
visited with its due punishment. From that time the Willow appears never
again to have been associated with feelings of gladness. Even among
heathen nations, for what reason we know not, it was a tree of evil
omen, and was employed to make the torches carried at funerals. Our own
poets made the Willow the symbol of despairing woe."--JOHNS. This is the
more remarkable because the tree referred to in the Psalms, the Weeping
Willow (_Salix Babylonica_), which by its habit of growth is to us so
suggestive of crushing sorrow, was quite unknown in Europe till a very
recent period. "It grows abundantly on the banks of the Euphrates, and
other parts of Asia, as in Palestine, and also in North Africa;" but it
is said to have been introduced into England during the last century,
and then in a curious way. "Many years ago, the well-known poet,
Alexander Pope, who resided at Twickenham, received a basket of Figs as
a present from Turkey. The basket was made of the supple branches of the
Weeping Willow, the very same species under which the captive Jews sat
when they wept by the waters of Babylon. The poet valued highly the
small and t