I 10 
NATURE NOTES. 
“ Vou call it ‘ love lies bleeding ’ — so you may, 
Though the red flower, not prostrate, only droops, 
As we have seen it here from day to day. 
From month to month, life passing not away : 
A flower how rich in sadness ! ” 
The Dying Gladiator, Adonis drooping beneath his death 
wound, were alike seen imaged by Wordsworth in his saddest 
of sad flowers as well as the lover : — 
“ Who first, weighed down by scorn, in some lone bower 
Did press this semblance of unpitied smart 
Into the service of his constant heart. 
His own dejection, downcast flower ! could share 
With thine, and gave the mournful name which thou wilt ever bear.” 
One cannot, of course, be guided in these things only by a 
poet’s fancy, but the feeling in regard to the amaranth appears 
to have been very widely spread. Among the old herbalists the 
amaranth is known as the floramor — the flower of love. It is 
always the flower of lovers, and although some modern writers 
think with Dr. Prior that the association of love with the 
amaranth came originally through confusion made between atiior 
and amai', the beginning of the word amarantus, this seems to 
me both far-fetched and improbable. How much more likely 
that it was named from its aspect, its drooping sorrowful air, 
its blood-red mysterious colouring. As I looked a little further 
into the question the names given by the writers on sacred 
flower-lore seemed still to support this theory. To them the 
amaranth was a symbol of discipline and deepest sorrow as well 
as of deepest love. They had not been struck apparently as 
much by the mournful droop of the long flower heads as by 
their resemblance to a blood-stained scourge. In France I 
discovered the amaranth was the “ discipline of the religious,” 
the cordcliere (Franciscan’s girdle?), and in parts of Southern 
Europe, accordiiig to an authority on the subject, it was known 
by the name “ scourge of our Blessed Lord.” God’s flower, 
flower gentle, floramor, love lies bleeding — all these names 
became very suggestive to me as I watched the dull red tassels 
day by day, and the “ coar.se annual ” as my friends called it, 
continued to bloom undisturbed, and to cover more and more 
space with its strange foliage. 
“ Never enlivened with the liveliest r.iy 
That fosters growth or checks or cheers decay. 
Nor by the heaviest raindrops more deprest ; 
This flower that first appeared as summer’s guest 
Preserves her beauty mid autumnal leaves, 
And to her mournful habits fondly cleaves.” 
Many years have passed since my summers were spent in 
the old Richmond garden, but it is very pleasant to linger once 
again in the little world of flowers encircled by its high vine- 
covered walls. The faint purple of the wistaria blossoms shines 
