3 ° 
The Rose. 
yet enhausted its beauties—has not yet even completed the 
catalogue of its charms. 
Much as Western folks have lauded Queen Rose, their com¬ 
mendations are faint compared with the adulation (we had 
almost said adoration) her loveliness invokes from the natives 
of Oriental lands. It is true that with them the rose attains a 
magnitude and magnificence scarcely comprehended in these 
colder climes. There, travellers say, the elegance of the trees, 
bending beneath their load of fragrant blossom, is beyond all 
power of description ; and, what renders the attraction greater, 
is the song of the nightingales continually warbling in the 
bosom of their beloved flowers. And, as 
“Other lands and other floral rites, 
The thought poetic and the pen invites,” 
let us see what the admiring Oriental has to say about the 
masterpiece of florigraphy. 
There is scarcely a great name in their literature that has 
not paid tribute to “ the bloom of love." Their poems are 
filled with its praise, and quaintly fantastic are some of the 
numberless beautiful legends with which they have entwined 
it; but of all the charming tales they tell you of the rose, none 
are more poetically valuable than those which describe the 
passionate love borne for it by the nightingale. In the “ Book 
of the Nightingale,” by the Persian poet Attar, the whole 
feathered creation is represented as appearing before Solomon, 
and making a charge against the nightingale of disturbing 
their rest by the plaintiveness of its warbling. The wise king 
summoned, questioned, and finally acquitted the poor bird, 
when it assured him that its frenzied strains were caused by 
the distracting love it entertained for the rose—a love that 
compelled it to ease its oppressed bosom by breaking forth 
into the touching lamentations for which it was accused. 
This legend is a favourite one with the Persians, who devoutly 
believe that this bird flutters about the rose until, overpowered 
by love and perfume, it falls to the ground stupefied. 
Saadi, Hafiz, Jami, and numberless other Persian poets of 
more or less renown, have sung the praises of “ the blooming 
rose;” and from the verses of the last named we learn that 
the first rose appeared in Gulistan at the time the flowers 
