THE MOSS ROSE
The Angel of the Flowers one day,
Beneath a rose tree sleeping lay,
The spirit to whom charge is given
To bathe young buds in dews of heaven,
Awaking from his light repose
The Angel whispered to the Rose
"O fondest object of my care
Still fairest found where all is fair,
For the sweet shade thou givest to me
Ask what thou wilt 'tis granted thee"
"Then" said the Rose, "with deepened glow
On me another grace bestow."
The spirit paused in silent thought
What grace was there the flower had not?
'Twas but a moment--o'er the rose
A veil of moss the Angel throws,
And robed in Nature's simple weed,
Could there a flower that rose exceed?
Madame de Genlis tells us that during her first visit to England she saw
a moss-rose for the first time in her life, and that when she took it
back to Paris it gave great delight to her fellow-citizens, who said it
was the first that had ever been seen in that city. Madame de Latour
says that Madame de Genlis was mistaken, for the moss-rose came
originally from Provence and had been known to the French for ages.
The French are said to have cultivated the Rose with extraordinary care
and success. It was the favorite flower of the Empress Josephine, who
caused her own name to be traced in the parterres at Malmaison with a
plantation of the rarest roses. In the royal rosary at Versailles there
are standards eighteen feet high grafted with twenty different varieties
of the rose.
With the Romans it was no metaphor but an allusion to a literal fact
when they talked of sleeping upon beds of roses. Cicero in his third
oration against Verres, when charging the proconsul with luxurious
habits, stated that he had made the tour of Sicily seated upon roses.
And Seneca says, of course jestingly, that a Sybarite of the name of
Smyrndiride was unable to sleep if one of the rose-petals on his bed
happened to be curled! At a feast which Cleopatra gave to Marc Antony
the floor of the hall was covered with fresh roses to the depth of
eighteen inches. At a fête given by Nero at Baiae the sum of four
millions of sesterces or about 20,000l. was incurred for roses. The
Natives of India are fond of the rose, and are lavish in their
expenditure at great festivals, but I suppose that no millionaire
amongst them ever spent such an amount of money as this upon flowers
alone.[076]
I shall close the poetical quotations on the Rose with one of
Shakespeare's sonnets.
O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem,
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give.
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour which doth in it live.
The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumed tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly,
When summer's breath their masked buds discloses;
But for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwoo'd and unrespected fade;
Die to themselves. Sweet Roses do not so;
Of then sweet deaths are sweetest odours made:
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
When that shall fade, my verse distils your truth.
There are many hundred acres of rose trees at Ghazeepore which are
cultivated for distillation, and making "attar." There are large fields
of roses in England also, for the manufacture of rose-water.
There is a story about the origin of attar of Roses. The Princess
Nourmahal caused a large tank, on which she used to be rowed about with
the great Mogul, to be filled with rose-water. The heat of the sun
separating the water from the essential oil of the rose, the latter was
observed to be floating on the surface. The discovery was immediately
turned to good account. At Ghazeepoor, the essence, atta or uttar
or otto, or whatever it should be called, is obtained with great
simplicity and ease. After the rose water is prepared it is put into
large open vessels which are left out at night. Early in the morning the
oil that floats upon the surface is skimmed off, or sucked up with fine
dry cotton wool, put into bottles, and carefully sealed. Bishop Heber
says that to produce one rupee's weight of atta 200,000 well grown roses
are required, and that a rupee's weight sells from 80 to 100 rupees. The
atta sold in Calcutta is commonly adulterated with the oil of sandal
wood.
LINNAEA BOREALIS
The LINNAEA BOREALIS, or two horned Linnaea, though a simple Lapland
flower, is interesting to all botanists from its association with the
name of the Swedish Sage. It has pretty little bells and is very
fragrant. It is a wild, unobtrusive plant and is very averse to the
trim lawn and the gay flower-border. This little woodland beauty pines
away under too much notice. She prefers neglect, and would rather waste
her sweetness on the desert air, than be introduced into the fashionable
lists of Florist's flowers. She shrinks from exposure to the sun. A
gentleman after walking with Linnaeus on the shores of the lake near
Charlottendal on a lovely evening, writes thus "I gathered a small
flower and asked if it was the Linnaea borealis. 'Nay,' said the
philosopher, 'she lives not here, but in the middle of our largest
woods. She clings with her little arms to the moss, and seems to resist
very gently if you force her from it. She has a complexion like a
milkmaid, and ah! she is very, very sweet and agreeable!"
THE FORGET-ME-NOT
The dear little FORGET-ME-NOT, (myosotis palustris)[077] with its eye
of blue, is said to have derived its touching appellation from a
sentimental German story. Two lovers were walking on the bank of a rapid
stream. The lady beheld the flower growing on a little island, and
expressed a passionate desire to possess it. He gallantly plunged into
the stream and obtained the flower, but exhausted by the force of the
tide, he had only sufficient strength left as he neared the shore to
fling the flower at the fair one's feet, and exclaim "Forget-me-not!"
(Vergiss-mein-nicht.) He was then carried away by the stream, out of
her sight for ever.
THE PERIWINKLE.
The PERIWINKLE (vinca or pervinca) has had its due share of poetical
distinction. In France the common people call it the Witch's violet. It
seems to have suggested to Wordsworth an idea of the consciousness of
flowers.
Through primrose tufts, in that sweet bower,
The Periwinkle trailed its wreaths,
And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
Mr. J.L. Merritt, has some complimentary lines on this flower.
The Periwinkle with its fan-like leaves
All nicely levelled, is a lovely flower
Whose dark wreath, myrtle like, young Flora weaves;
There's none more rare
Nor aught more meet to deck a fairy's bower
Or grace her hair.
The little blue Periwinkle is rendered especially interesting to the
admirers of the genius of Rousseau by an anecdote that records his
emotion on meeting it in one of his botanical excursions. He had seen it
thirty years before in company with Madame de Warens. On meeting its
sweet face again, after so long and eventful an interim, he fell upon
his knees, crying out--Ah! voila de la pervanche! "It struck him,"
says Hazlitt, "as the same little identical flower that he remembered so
well; and thirty years of sorrow and bitter regret were effaced from his
memory."
The Periwinkle was once supposed to be a cure for many diseases. Lord
Bacon says that in his time people afflicted with cramp wore bands of
green periwinkle tied about their limbs. It had also its supposed moral
influences. According to Culpepper the leaves of the flower if eaten by
man and wife together would revive between them a lost affection.
THE BASIL.
Sweet marjoram, with her like, sweet basil, rare for smell.
Drayton.
The BASIL is a plant rendered poetical by the genius which has handled
it. Boccaccio and Keats have made the name of the sweet basil sound
pleasantly in the ears of many people who know nothing of botany. A
species of this plant (known in Europe under the botanical name of
Ocymum villosum, and in India as the Toolsee) is held sacred by the
Hindus. Toolsee was a disciple of Vishnu. Desiring to be his wife she
excited the jealousy of Lukshmee by whom she was transformed into the
herb named after her.[078]
THE TULIP.
Tulips, like the ruddy evening streaked.
Southey.
The TULIP (tulipa) is the glory of the garden, as far as color without
fragrance can confer such distinction. Some suppose it to be 'The Lily
of the Field' alluded to in the Sermon on the Mount. It grows wild in
Syria.
The name of the tulip is said to be of Turkish origin. It was called
Tulipa from its resemblance to the tulipan or turban.
What crouds the rich Divan to-day
With turbaned heads, of every hue
Bowing before that veiled and awful face
Like Tulip-beds of different shapes and dyes,
Bending beneath the invisible west wind's sighs?
Moore.
The reader has probably heard of the Tulipomania once carried to so
great an excess in Holland.
With all his phlegm, it broke a Dutchman's heart,
At a vast price, with one loved root to part.
Crabbe.
About the middle of the 17th century the city of Haarlem realized in
three years ten millions sterling by the sale of tulips. A single tulip
(the Semper Augustus) was sold for one thousand pounds. Twelve acres
of land were given for a single root and engagements to the amount of
£5,000 were made for a first-class tulip when the mania was at its
height. A gentleman, who possessed a tulip of great value, hearing that
some one was in possession of a second root of the same kind, eagerly
secured it at a most extravagant price. The moment he got possession of
it, he crushed it under his foot. "Now," he exclaimed, "my tulip is
unique!"
A Dutch Merchant gave a sailor a herring for his breakfast. Jack seeing
on the Merchant's counter what he supposed to be a heap of onions, took
up a handful of them and ate them with his fish. The supposed onions
were tulip bulbs of such value that they would have paid the cost of a
thousand Royal feasts.[079]
The tulip mania never leached so extravagant a height in England as in
Holland, but our country did not quite escape the contagion, and even so
late as the year 1836 at the sale of Mr. Clarke's tulips at Croydon,
seventy two pounds were given for a single bulb of the Fanny Kemble;
and a Florist in Chelsea in the same year, priced a bulb in his
catalogue at 200 guineas.
The Tulip is not endeared to us by many poetical associations. We have
read, however, one pretty and romantic tale about it. A poor old woman
who lived amongst the wild hills of Dartmoor, in Devonshire, possessed a
beautiful bed of Tulips, the pride of her small garden. One fine
moonlight night her attention was arrested by the sweet music which
seemed to issue from a thousand Liliputian choristers. She found that
the sounds proceeded from her many colored bells of Tulips. After
watching the flowers intently she perceived that they were not swayed to
and fro by the wind, but by innumerable little beings that were climbing
on the stems and leaves. They were pixies. Each held in its arms an
elfin baby tinier than itself. She saw the babies laid in the bells of
the plant, which were thus used as cradles, and the music was formed of
many lullabies. When the babies were asleep the pixies or fairies left
them, and gamboled on the neighbouring sward on which the old lady
discovered the day after, several new green rings,--a certain evidence
that her fancy had not deceived her! At earliest dawn the fairies had
returned to the tulips and taken away their little ones. The good old
woman never permitted her tulip bed to be disturbed. She regarded it as
holy ground. But when she died, some Utilitarian gardener turned it into
a parsley bed! The parsley never flourished. The ground was now cursed.
In gratitude to the memory of the benevolent dame who had watched and
protected the floral nursery, every month, on the night before the full
moon, the fairies scattered flowers on her grave, and raised a sweet
musical dirge--heard only by poetic ears--or by maids and children who
Hold each strange tale devoutly true.
For as the poet says:
What though no credit doubting wits may give,
The fair and innocent shall still believe.
Men of genius are often as trustful as maids and children. Collins,
himself a lover of the wonderful, thus speaks of Tasso:--
Prevailing poet! whose undoubting mind
Believed the magic wonders that he sung.
All nature indeed is full of mystery to the imaginative.
And visions as poetic eyes avow
Hang on each leaf and cling to every bough.
The Hindoos believe that the Peepul tree of which the foliage trembles
like that of the aspen, has a spirit in every leaf.
"Did you ever see a fairy's funeral, Madam?" said Blake, the artist.
"Never Sir." "I have," continued that eccentric genius, "One night I
was walking alone in my garden. There was great stillness amongst the
branches and flowers and more than common sweetness in the air. I heard
a low and pleasant sound, and knew not whence it came: at last I
perceived the broad leaf of a flower move, and underneath I saw a
procession of creatures the size and color of green and gray
grasshoppers, bearing a body laid out on a rose leaf, which they
buried with song, and then disappeared."
THE PINK.
The PINK (dianthus) is a very elegant flower. I have but a short story
about it. The young Duke of Burgundy, grandson of Louis the Fifteenth,
was brought up in the midst of flatterers as fulsome as those rebuked by
Canute. The youthful prince was fond of cultivating pinks, and one of
his courtiers, by substituting a floral changeling, persuaded him that
one of those pinks planted by the royal hand had sprung up into bloom in
a single night! One night, being unable to sleep, he wished to rise, but
was told that it was midnight; he replied "Well then, I desire it to be
morning."
The pink is one of the commonest of the flowers in English gardens. It
is a great favorite all over Europe. The botanists have enumerated about
400 varieties of it.