142 THE POETRY OF FLOWERS 
LOVE 
MYRTLE. 
See, rooted in the earth, her kindly bed, 
The unendangered myrtle, decked with flowers, 
Before the threshold stands to welcome us! 
Wordsworth. 
The oak has ever been consecrated to Jupiter — the laurel to 
Apollo — the olive to Minerva—'and the myrtle to Venus. 
Among the ancients the myrtle was a great favourite, for its 
elegance, and its sweet and glossy evergreen foliage. Its per¬ 
fumed and delicate flowers seem destined to adorn the fair 
forehead of love, and are said to have been made the emblem 
of love, and dedicated to beauty, when Venus first sprang from 
the sea. We are informed by mythological writers that when 
the fair goddess first appeared upon the waves, she was prece¬ 
ded by the Hours, with a scarf of a thousand colours and a gar¬ 
land of myrtle. 
At Rome, the first temple dedicated to Venus was surround¬ 
ed by groves of myrtle; and after the victory that goddess 
achieved over Pallas and Juno, she was crowned with myrtle 
by Cupids. Surprised one day, on going out of a bath, by a 
troop of satyrs, she took refuge behind a myrtle-bush; she also 
avenged herself with myrtle branches on the audacious Psyche, 
who had dared to compare her own transitory graces to those 
of an immortal beauty. 
Although triumphs are no longer celebrated in the Roman 
capitol, the Italian ladies ^have preserved a very lively passion 
for this lovely shrub ; preferring its odour to that of the most 
precious essences, and throwing into their baths water distilled 
from its leaves, being persuaded that the tree of Venus is fa¬ 
vourable to beauty. If the ancients had that idea — if the tree 
so consecrated to Venus were to them the tree of love — it was 
from the true analogy between its power and that of love, for 
wherever the myrtle grows it spreads itself around, to the ex- 
