ROSE-BUSH. 371 



though rich the spot 



With every flower this earth has got, 

 What is it to the nightingale 

 If there his darling rose is not ?" 



LALLA ROOKU. 



A festival is held in Persia, called the feast of Roses, 

 which lasts the whole time they are in bloom. 



" And all is ecstasy, for now 

 The valley holds its feast of roses; 

 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 !" 



LALLA ROOKH. 



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, t( I was struck with the appearance of two rose-trees full 

 fourteen feet high, laden with thousands of flowers, in every degree of 

 expansion, and of abloom 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 increase 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. 3. 



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 



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