Jasmine. 
69 
her lover, who had hitherto been compelled to remain in a state 
of single wretchedness, for want of means to alter his condi¬ 
tion. In memory of this love-legend, Tuscan girls wear a 
nosegay of jasmine on their wedding-day; and, says the pro¬ 
verb, “ she who is worthy to wear a nosegay of jasmine is as 
good as a fortune to her husband.” 
The Hindoos, who use odoriferous flowers in their sacrifices, 
particularly value the jasmine for this purpose, and mostly 
combine it with the flower which they call zambuk. 
Jasmine is most profusely cultivated in Italian gardens. In 
the East it is carefully tended for the sake of its stem, out of 
which the luxurious Orientals manufacture their pipes. In 
Arabia Felix the women strip the blossoms of this plant from 
their stalks, and wear them in their hair for ornaments. 
One of the shrubs of which Milton formed the bower of 
Adam and Eve in Paradise was jasmine; and Moore, in an 
allusion to night-blooming flowers, thus sweetly introduces this 
favourite blossom: 
“ Many a perfume breathed 
From plants that wake when others sleep; 
From timid jasmine-buds that keep 
Their odour to themselves all day, 
But when the sunlight dies away 
Let the delicious secret out 
To every breeze that roams about.” 
Churchill states that it is 
“The jasmine, with which the queen of flowers, 
To charm her god, adorns his favourite bowers; 
Which brides, by the plain hand of neatness drest,— 
Unenvied rival! — wear upon the breast; 
Sweet as the incense of the morn, and chaste 
As the pure zone which circles Dian’s waist.” 
St. Pierre, in his “ Studies of Nature,” speaking of the Caro¬ 
lina jasmine —the token of separation ,—says that that tiny 
feathered fairy, the humming-bird, builds his nest in one of 
the leaves of this plant, which he rolls up into the form of a 
cone: he finds his subsistence in its red flowers, resembling 
those of the foxglove, the nectareous glands of which he licks 
with his tongue; he squeezes into them his little body, which 
looks in these flowers like an emerald set in coral, and some¬ 
times gets so far that he may be caught in this situation. 
