"Pity that it hides half the row of yon houses from the palace! It will be carried off with the two pines in the autumn." "O, Don Pepino!" cried I, "the French, who abhor whatever is old, and whatever is great, have spared it; the Austrians, who sell their fortresses and their armies, nay, sometimes their daughters, have not sold it; must it fall? Shall the cypress of Soma be without a rival? I hope to have left Lombardy before it happens; for events, which you will tell me ought never to interest me at all, not only do interest me, but make me--I confess it--sorrowful." "Who in the world could ever cut down a linden, or dare, in his senses, to break a twig off one? To a linden was fastened the son of William Tell, when the apple was cloven on his head. Years afterward, often did the father look higher and lower, and search laboriously, to descry if any mark were remaining of the cord upon its bark! Often must he have inhaled this very odor! What a refreshment was it to a father's heart! The flowers of the linden should be the only incense offered up in the churches of God. Happy the man whose aspirations are pure enough to mingle with it! "How many fond, and how many lively thoughts have been nurtured under this very tree! How many kind hearts have beaten here! Its branches are not so numerous as the couples they have invited to sit beside it, nor its blossoms and leaves as the expressions of tenderness it has witnessed! What appeals to the pure all-seeing heavens! What similitudes to the everlasting mountains! What protestations of eternal truth and constancy! from those who are now earth, they, and their shrouds, and their coffins! The caper and fig-tree have split the monument. Emblems of past loves and future hopes, severed names which the holiest rites united, broken letters of brief happiness, bestrew the road, and speak to the passers by in vain. To see this linden was worth a journey of five hundred miles!"