152 POETICAL LANGUAGE OP FLOWERS. 
a form more beautiful than any of the flowers he had 
hitherto knelt beside. 
He listened to the low murmurs which escaped from 
the opening rose-buds of her lips, and he heard her 
pray to be wedded to a love that might never perish, 
to an essence that could never know decay, were it 
but a moving shadow of immortality she cared not, if 
even she never beheld the substance of the divinity 
she loved. “ Make me but the remotest point,” sighed 
Psyche, in her sleep, “that forms a portion of the 
starry circle which the star eternally shines upon, the 
furthest that is lighted by the radiance on which it 
waits, feeling itself, nevertheless, as if a portion of that 
star, although only admitted there like a worshiper 
on whom the bright elfulgejice falls. Let me become 
a part of the lightest down that feathers the edge of 
an immortal wing, so that I may but feel that I am a 
part of that immortality ; or, if I must perish, give me 
a brief career of beauty, crowd the space of a year into 
a single day, and, like the butterfly, send me forth 
winged,—a divinity floating above the flowers,—that I 
may before I die taste of the existence of the gods, and 
catch, like them, the ethereal air, which hath never 
beaten upon the bosom of the earth.” 
