Rosa The Hindu god Indra, even Buddha himself, 

 Mystica. suffered for robbing a paradisaical garden of a 

 rose. How suggestive it is, that the Eve of 

 the Aztec garden of Eden sinned, not for 

 plucking an apple but a rose : it was a fatal 

 rose, too, that the Eve of primitive Mexican 

 legend gathered to her undoing and that of all 

 her descendants. 



What innumerable legends centre round 

 this flower. In every country and in either 

 hemisphere, north of the Equator, the poet 

 and the myth -maker and the legend- weaver 

 have occupied their imaginations to enhance 

 its beauty, to deepen its significance. 



Long ago Bion told how the rose sprang 

 from the blood of the wounded Adonis, the 

 supreme type of beauty, and of the tears of 

 Venus. An older Hellenic legend declares 

 that the rose was originally white, till Eros, 

 dancing among the gods, upset a goblet of 

 nectar upon Venus's flower, which thereupon 

 became red. Christian legend, on the other 

 hand, would have it that the red rose sprang 

 from the brands which had been lighted at 

 Bethlehem to burn to death a Christian virgin- 

 martyr. Remote from Syria as from Greece, 

 the Scandinavian legend arose that this flower 

 was white till Baldur, the god of Youth and 

 Love, bled at the coming of Christ — akin to 



344 



