The Willows

“ The willows, for once, were motionless and silent. Then a sound began to reach my ears faintly, a peculiar sound--something like the humming of a distant gong. It seemed to come across to us in the darkness from the waste of swamps and willows opposite. It was repeated at regular intervals, but it was certainly neither the sound of a bell nor the hooting of a distant steamer. I can liken it to nothing so much as to the sound of an immense gong, suspended far up in the sky, repeating incessantly its muffled metallic note, soft and musical, as it was repeatedly struck. ”

“ But this cry found no expression, for as my eyes wandered from the plain beyond to the island round me and noted our little tent half hidden among the willows, a dreadful discovery leaped out at me, compared to which my terror of the walking winds seemed as nothing at all. ”

“ Surely the bushes now crowded much closer--unnecessarily, unpleasantly close. They had moved nearer.
Creeping with silent feet over the shifting sands, drawing imperceptibly nearer by soft, unhurried movements, the willows had come closer during the night. But had the wind moved them, or had they moved of themselves? I recalled the sound of infinite small patterings and the pressure upon the tent and upon my own heart that caused me to wake in terror. I swayed for a moment in the wind like a tree, finding it hard to keep my upright position on the sandy hillock. ”

“ The dawn was just about to break, and a faint whitish light spread upwards over the clouds from a thin strip of clear horizon. No wind stirred. I could just make out the bushes and river beyond, and the pale sandy patches. In my excitement I ran frantically to and fro about the island, calling him by name, shouting at the top of my voice the first words that came into my head. But the willows smothered my voice, and the humming muffled it, so that the sound only traveled a few feet round me. ”

“ And, apart quite from the elements, the willows connected themselves subtly with my malaise, attacking the mind insidiously somehow by reason of their vast numbers, and contriving in some way or other to represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power, moreover, not altogether friendly to us.
Great revelations of nature, of course, never fail to impress in one way or another, and I was no stranger to moods of the kind. Mountains overawe and oceans terrify, while the mystery of great forests exercises a spell peculiarly its own. ”

“ With this general hush of the wind--though it still indulged in occasional brief gusts--the river seemed to me to grow blacker, the willows to stand more densely together. The latter, too, kept up a sort of independent movement of their own, rustling among themselves when no wind stirred, and shaking oddly from the roots upwards. When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance ”

“ The eeriness of this lonely island, set among a million willows, swept by a hurricane, and surrounded by hurrying deep waters, touched us both, I fancy. Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man, it lay there beneath the moon, remote from human influence, on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows. And we, in our rashness, had dared to invade it, even to make use of it! Something more than the power of its mystery stirred in me as I lay on the sand, feet to fire, and peered up through the leaves at the stars. ”

“ In high flood this great acreage of sand, shingle-beds, and willow-grown islands is almost topped by the water, but in normal seasons the bushes bend and rustle in the free winds, showing their silver leaves to the sunshine in an ever-moving plain of bewildering beauty. These willows never attain to the dignity of trees; they have no rigid trunks; they remain humble bushes, with rounded tops and soft outline, swaying on slender stems that answer to the least pressure of the wind ”

“ The Willow-Wren was twittering his thin little song, hidden himself in the dark selvedge of the river bank. Though it was past ten o’clock at night, the sky still clung to and retained some lingering skirts of light from the departed day; and the sullen heats of the torrid afternoon broke up and rolled away at the dispersing touch of the cool fingers of the short midsummer night. ”

“ Then we lay panting and laughing after our exertions on the hot yellow sand, sheltered from the wind, and in the full blaze of a scorching sun, a cloudless blue sky above, and an immense army of dancing, shouting willow bushes, closing in from all sides, shining with spray and clapping their thousand little hands as though to applaud the success of our efforts. ”

“ We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.' 'The poet valued highly the small slender twigs, as associated with so much that was interesting, and he untwisted the basket and planted one of the branches in the ground. It had some tiny buds upon it, and he hoped he might be able to rear it, as none of this species of willow was known in England. Happily, the willow is very quick to take root and grow. The little branch soon became a tree, and drooped gracefully over the river in the same manner that its race had done over the waters of Babylon. ”

“ The Old Willow-tree 1
There are many kinds of willows and they are so unlike that you would hardly believe them to be relations.
There are some so small and wretched that they creep along the ground. They live on the heath, or high up in the mountains, or in the cold arctic regions. In the winter, they are quite hidden under the snow; in the summer, they just poke up their noses above the tops of the heather.
There are people who shrink from notice because they are so badly off. It is simply stupid to be ashamed of being poor; and the little dwarf-willows are not a bit ashamed. ”

“ When you see a tree with a long narrow leaf like a sword, you are sure at once it is a willow. The willow gives its name to this shape; for when we see other plants with leaves of this pattern, we always call them willow-leaves. The flowers of all the willows are very much alike. They all grow on tails, true pussy-cats’ tails, so soft and silky are they. But they are the tails of angry pussy-cats, for they stand up straight and stiff and thick; they do not hang down wagging and waving in a good-tempered way. The flowers are soft silky scales, fastened closely together on the stalk. ”

“ The very atmosphere had proved itself a magnifying medium to distort every indication: the otter rolling in the current, the hurrying boatman making signs, the shifting willows, one and all had been robbed of its natural character, and revealed in something of its other aspect--as it existed across the border to that other region. And this changed aspect I felt was now not merely to me, but to the race. The whole experience whose verge we touched was unknown to humanity at all. ”

“ So universal is the association of sadness and grief with the Willow, that “to wear the Willow” has become a familiar proverb. Under Willows the captive Children of Israel wept and mourned in Babylon. Fuller, referring to this melancholy episode in their history, says of the Willow:—“A sad tree, whereof such as have lost their love make their mourning garlands; and we know that exiles hung their harps on such doleful supports. The very leaves of the Willow are of a mournful hue.” Virgil remarks on ”

“ All of the willows have long, slender leaves. Each leaf is a narrow, thin, delicately veined blade that grows by itself, and alternately, along a slender stem, making a sort of feathered branch. The pussy willow leaves are a bright green. The black willow leaf is broader, saw-notched, and it tapers toward both stem and tiplike a canoe. It is bright green above and silvery underneath. The leaf of the white willow is a gray green lined with silver, and it droops from yellow stems. The crack willow, whose twigs snap so easily, has a green leaf lined with a waxy coating. ”

“ They cover the northern parts of the earth from the equator to Lapland. Their number and their varieties of form increase between the 46th and 70th degrees of latitude, more especially in that part of northern Europe which has been so remarkably indented by the early revolutions of our planet. I am acquainted with ten or twelve species of inter-tropical Willows, and these, like the Willows of the southern hemisphere, are deserving of special attention. ”

“ THE RELIEF OF WET WILLOWS
Now this is the ballad of seven men
Who rode to Wet Willows and back again.
It was only an hour before the dawn
When they deemed it best to awaken Sir John.
For they knew his sword long years had hung
On the wall, unhandled. (Once he was young,—
They did not remember; the tale had been told
To them by their fathers, ere they grew old—
And then his sword was a dreaded thing
When the men from the North came a-warfaring!) ”

“ Willows are now beautiful objects in the landscape; they are like rich masses of arborescent silver, especially if stirred by the breeze, their light and fluent forms contrasting finely with the still and sombre aspect of the other trees. ”

“ They will fling themselves upon a man and hold on with every ounce of strength in their wiry bodies, till he is thrown and helpless. More than once have I seen them do it, and I know whereof I speak. Their motive is usually robbery. And watch out for the "strong arm." Every kid in the push I travelled with was expert at it. Even French Kid mastered it before he lost his legs.
I have strong upon me now a vision of what I once saw in "The Willows." The Willows was a clump of trees in a waste piece of land near the railway depot and not more than five minutes walk from the heart of Sacramento. ”

“ It groweth incredibly fast, it being a by-word in this county, that the profit by willows will buy the owner a horse before that by other trees will pay for his saddle. Let me add, that if green ashe may burne before a queen, withered willows may be allowed to burne before a lady.” The old saying, “She is in her willows” is here illustrated; it implies the mourning of a female for her lost mate.
The Willow (Salix)
In Sylvan Sketches, to an account of the willow, elegant poetical illustrations are attached, from whence are extracted the subjoined agreeable notices. ”

“ How Willow or Yew branches could ever have been substituted for such a very different branch as a Palm it is hard to say, but in lack of a better explanation, I think it not unlikely that it might have arisen from the direction for the Feast of Tabernacles in Leviticus xxiii. 40: "Ye shall take you on the first day the boughs of goodly trees, the branches of Palm trees, and the boughs of thick trees, and Willows of the brook." But from whatever cause the name and the custom was derived, the Willow was so named in very early times, and in Shakespeare's time the name was very common. ”

“ In the early spring days we gather pussy willows. They are really the flower buds. Put them in water and watch the catkins, as the flowers are called, develop. The Weeping Willow is a native of Asia; it grew near ancient Babylon. You will remember that the Bible tells us that the people of Israel hung their harps upon the willow tree by the waters of Babylon. They are trees of rapid [159] growth, as are also the aspens and cottonwoods. The last-named trees derive their name from the peculiarity of the seed, which is surrounded by cotton-like fiber. ”

“ I mean the most common kind to be found in the northern States—the kind that stands beside the roadside watering-trough. The impression is common that willows will thrive only in wet places. It is true that a willow is very comfortable in places where many other trees will suffer from wet feet; yet it will give good results elsewhere. It is reasonable to suppose that poor soil goes with a poor school [444] building, and a refined tree would probably find life hard in such a place. I should certainly plant a willow in such cases. It will thrive where a goat can, and where a sheep cannot. ”

“ For one cannot recommend a book to all the hundreds of people whom one has met in ten years without discovering whether it is well known or not. It is the amazing truth that none of those hundreds had heard of The Wind in the Willows until I told them about it. ”

“ In their natural condition Willows are graceful and picturesque, but a large number of the examples met with in our rambles have been so altered for commercial reasons as to be more grotesque than beautiful. It is not the timber-man who is responsible this time, for a pollard Willow, though it produces a shock-head of long slender shoots, suitable for basket-rods, lets in moisture at the top of the bole, and the wood is more or less decayed and worthless. ”

“ Further, the species belonging at first in the Eastern Hemisphere have spread well over our own side of the globe, so that it seems odd to regard the white willow and the weeping willow as foreigners. At Niagara Falls, in the beautiful park on the American side, on the islands amid the toss of the waters, there are many willows, and those planted by man are no less beautiful than those resulting from Nature's gardening. ”

“ The golden willows are coming into leaf. The weeping willow is not seen here, our winters are too severe for it. Some persons think, that by watching a young tree carefully, and giving it several years to take root, without being discouraged by its slow growth, it would in time become acclimated; the experiment is now going on, but its success is very doubtful. At present, there is no weeping willow within some distance of us, excepting a couple of young nurslings in gardens of the village. ”

“ In midmost of the stream, embraced in the weir’s shimmering arm-spread, a small island lay anchored, fringed close with willow and silver birch and alder. Reserved, shy, but full of significance, it hid whatever it might hold behind a veil, keeping it till the hour should come, and, with the hour, those who were called and chosen. ”