ROSE. *271 



That joyous time when pleasures pour 

 Profusely round, and in their shower 

 Hearts open, like the season's Rose, 

 The flowret of a hundred leaves, 

 Expanding while the dew-fall flows, 

 And every leaf its balm receives ! ' 



" ' Persia is the very land of Roses. " On my first entering 

 this bower of fairy land," says Sir Robert Kerr Porter, speaking 

 of the garden of one of the royal palaces of Persia, " I was 

 struck with the appearance of two Rose-trees, full fourteen feet 

 high, laden with thousands of flowers, in every degree of ex- 

 pansion, and of a bloom and delicacy of scent that imbued the 

 whole atmosphere with exquisite perfume. Indeed, I believe 

 that in no country in the world does the Rose grow in such 

 perfection as in Persia ; in no country is it so cultivated and 

 prized by the natives. Their gardens and courts are crowded 

 by its plants, their rooms ornamented with vases filled with its 

 gathered bunches, and every bath strewed with the full-blown 

 flowers, plucked with the ever-replenished stems. ^ # * * 

 But in this delicious garden of Negaaristan, the eye and the 

 smell are not the only senses regaled by the presence of the 

 Rose. The ear is enchanted by the wild and beautiful notes 

 of multitudes of nightingales, whose warblings seem to in- 

 crease in melody and softness with the unfolding of their 

 favorite flowers. Here, indeed, the stranger is more powerfully 

 reminded that he is in the genuine country of the nightingale 

 and the Rose." (Persia in Miniature, vol. iii.) 



" Sir William Ouseley accompanied his brother, the am- 

 bassador, on a visit to a man of high rank at Teheran ; and 

 though there was a great profusion of meat and fruit at this 

 entertainment, ' it might,' he says, ' have been styled the Feast 

 of Roses, for the floor of the great hall, or open-fronted talar, 

 was spread in the middle, and in the recess, with Roses forming 

 the figures of cypress-trees ; Roses decorated all the candle- 

 sticks, which were very numerous. The surface of the hawz, 

 or reservoir of water, was completely covered with rose-leaves, 



