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A robin flicked down out of the cypress tree and perched on the gate top, looked up at Cleek with bright, sharp eyes, flung out a wee little trill, and was off again.
The crests of the hills near the river were occupied by silent villages, among whose white edifices rose pointed groups of cypress; and on the opposite side of the great city also existed other bivouacs of silence and oblivion. The city was surrounded by a closely drawn cordon of fortresses of the departed.
"You didn't!" "You did!" "You didn't, you didn't, you didn't!" "You did, you did!" Thus the eternal quarrel, begun before Hector and the Greeks were born, had raged in the Cypress Swamp, and increased in loudness every night, till on the flying slave girl's ears it pealed like God and Satan disputing for her soul.
Add to this, if you will, a bunch of hyssop, plant a cypress, of which Saint Melito speaks as emblematical of the Saviour, and which Monsieur Olier regards as symbolical of death; a myrtle, signifying compassion, according to a passage by Saint Gregory the Great; and, above all, do not omit the buckthorn, or Rhamnus for of that shrub the Jews twined the stems that formed Christ's crown and your chapel is complete."
The latter flow through dark thickets of cypress and palmetto, to the lake above named, which, in its turn, is united with the Gulf of Mexico, and it would almost appear as if nature, in a capricious moment, had chosen thus distinctly to mark the boundary of the two vast countries which the Sabine severs.
I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik Sadi of Shiraz, that "they asked a wise man, saying: Of the many celebrated trees which the Most High God has created lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, or free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit; what mystery is there in this?
The "Tree of the Dismal Night," a huge cypress under which Cortez is said to have wept as he watched the broken remnants of his army file past, is now hardly more than an enormous, hollow, burned-out stump, with a few huge branches that make it look at a distance like a flourishing tree still in the green prime of life. The day was rainy and a cold, raw wind blew.
It was in ignorance they sinned. They did not know. O my beautiful cypress, stately queen of the garden of the world, forgive me that once I gave to the little shrub-like women the worship that is rightly yours!
A cypress stands at the gate of each, and between them two angels in flight uphold a discus or aureole having within it eight rays. Above this again are three windows about which is spread a gorgeous decoration in mosaic.
Oh, those baths in the marble tank, my Father! I used to lie awake through the whole hot southern night, and think of that plunge at sunrise under the last stars. For we were in a burning country, and I pined for the tall green woods and the cold stream of my father's valley; and when I had cooled my limbs in the tank I lay all day in the scant cypress shade and dreamed of my next bath.
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