SUMMER MEETING. 51 



till it uncloses to his wooing. Since that day the rose will only open 

 in response to the sweet caresses of her wayward lover. 



Jami, the Persian poet, following the same fancy, sings of the loves 

 of the nightingale and the rose — the bulbul and the gul. "The night- 

 ingales warbled their enchanting notes, and rent the thin veils of the 

 rosebud and the rose." In another place he says: "You may place 

 a hundred handfuls of fragrant herbs and flowers before the nightin- 

 gale, yet he wishes not, in his constant heart, for more than the breath 

 of his beloved rose." The same poet, who seems never weary of 

 heaping his delicate fancies upon the rose, says : " The rose appeared 

 in Gulistan when the flowers demanded a new sovereign, because their 

 drowsy Lotus queen would sleep at night. At first the maiden queen 

 was white, but the nightingale, in the ardor of his love, pressed his 

 breast against the encircling thorns and covered her delicate petals 

 with his flowing blood." 



Attar, a well-named poet of the rose, tells us in his "Book of 

 Nightingales " that all the birds appeared before Solomon to make a 

 charge against the nightingale for disturbing their slumbers by his 

 warblings. Upon full examination of the criminal it appeared that the 

 disturbing song was the uncontrollable expression on the part of the 

 nightingale of his impassioned and distracting love for the rose. Sol- 

 omon, whom a fellow-feeling must have made wondrous kind, inquired 

 no further, but freely acquitted the culprit. 



The rose, which by common consent of all nations was born white 

 and thornless, has gathered around her numberless graceful and fanci- 

 ful stories to account for her color and her thorns. Boitard, in his 

 *' Monograph on the Rose," tells us that Moses said, " Before the Fall 

 roses were without thorns," but he does not add where he found this 

 statement of Moses. 



The ancients considered the color of the rose a question of suffi- 

 cient importance to make it the subject of a poetical contest. Theo- 

 phrastus and Bion, 300 B. C., each pleads for his own version of the 

 story. Venus, fearing for her lover Adonis the vengeance of Mars, 

 hid him in a thicket of roses. 



While the enamored queen of joy 



Flies to protect her lovely boy, 

 On whom the jealous war god rushes, 



She treads upon a thorned rose, 



And while the wound with crimson flows, 

 The snowy flow'ret feels her blood and blushes — 



Is Moore's translation of a Latin epigram embodying the fable. Bion, 

 in his famous idyl on the death of Adonis, says of Venus weeping 

 over her wounded and dying lover : 



