68 FAMILIAR GARDEN FLOWERS, 
Chasing, with eager hands and eyes, 
The beautiful blue damsel-flies, 
That flutter’d round the jasmine stems 
Like winged flow’rs or flying gems.” 
Cowper, who better understood the garden than any Engl 
poet, Shakespeare alone excepted, gives us a photograph 
the plant in four short lines— 
“The jasmine, throwing wide her elegant sweets, 
The deep dark green of whose unvarnish’d leaf 
Makes more conspicuous and illumines more 
The bright profusion of her scatter’d stars.” 
