The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862

But with the rose there are a thousand beautiful objects all consecrated by myth and legend, based on deeply-seated affinities, all reflecting the solemn mystery of birth and death in unity, all expressing love and pleasure, and all mutually convertible one into the other. All the differently-named Venuses, yes, all the goddesses of ancient mythology, are but one Venus and one goddess—all gods blend in one Arch-Bel, or 'Belerus old,' of myriad names—he, the inscrutable Abyss, self-developing into male and female—who is reflected again in every object which springs from them. All mountains meet in 'the solemn mystery of the guarded mount'—the lily teaches the same lessons as the rose and the sea shell—each and all are seen in the light ark which skims the waves, or floats high in heaven as the pearly-horned moon; and then the dew of the morning and the foaming sea become the wine of life and the honey of the flower, and they are found again in the CUP. So on through all beautiful forms, whether of nature or of the simpler creations of man—wherever we meet one, there, to the eye of him who has studied the purely natural science of symbolism, is a full garden of flowers of thought. Once master the primary solution of the great problem, once learn the method of its application, and every flower and simple attribute of life becomes invested with deep significance and earnest, passionate beauty. But this can be no half-way study, to be modified or qualified by prejudices. Do you seek, thirst for Truth, O reader? Dare you grasp it without blanching, without blushing? Then cast away all the loathsome littleness which has rusted and fouled around you, and look at Nature as she literally is, in her naked beauty, conceiving and forming, quickening and warming into infinitely varied and lovely life, and then forming once again with the strong and harsh influences of death, pain and decay. It avails nothing to be squeamish and timid in the tremendous laboratory of Truth. There is but little account taken of your parlor-propriety in the depths of ocean, where wild sea-monsters engender, where the million-tonned coral-rock rises to be crowned with palms, amid swaying tides and currents which cast up in a night leagues of sandy peninsulas. Little heed is taken of your prudish scruples or foul follies, where the screaming eagle chases his mate on the road of the mad North-wind; little care for your pitiful perversions of health and truth into scurvy jests or still scurvier blushes, wherever life takes new form as life, ever begetting through the endless chain of being. There is no learning a little and leaving the rest, for him who would explore the fountain-springs of Poetry and of Nature. The true poet, like the true man of science, cannot limit vision and thought to a handful of twigs or a cluster of leaves. In the minutest detail he recalls the roots, trunk, and branches—the smallest part is to him a reflection of the whole, and formed by the same laws.

The great minds of the early mythologic and hitherto Unknown Age had this advantage in shaping that stupendous Lehre or lore which embraced under the same laws, mythology, language, science, poetry, and art—they modified nothing and avoided nothing for fear of shocking conventional and artificial feelings. Nature was to them what she was to herself—literal. The great law of reproduction, around whose primary stage gathers all that is attractive or beautiful in organic life; the 'moment' toward which everything blossoms, and from which everything fades, was not by them ignored as non-existent, or treated in paltry equivoque, as though it were a secondary consequence and a vile corruption, instead of a healthy cause. Their science was, it is true, only founded on observation (and therefore easily warped to error by apparent analogies) instead of induction, while their æsthetics had the same illusive basis; and yet, by fearlessly following the great manifest laws of organic life, they were enabled to lay the foundations of all which in later ages came to perfection in the Hindu Mahabarata, and Sacrintala—in Greek statues, and, it may be, in Greek humanity—in Norse Eddas, and Druidic mysteries. All of these, and, with them, all that Phoenician, Etruscan, and Egyptian gave to beauty, owe their origin to the fearless incarnation in early times of the manifest laws of Nature in myth, song, and legend. He who would feel Nature as they felt it—a real, quickening presence, a thrilling, wildly beautiful life, inspiring the Moerad to madness by the intensity of rushing mountain torrent and passionately rustling leaves, a spirit breathing a god into every gray old rock and an exquisite love into every flower—should take up the clue which these old myths afford, and follow it to the end. Then the Hidden in forgotten lore will be revealed to him, the Orgie and Mystery will yield to him all, and more than all, they gave to Pythagoras of old. He will hold the key to every faith—nay more, he will form and feel new faiths for himself in studying mountains and seas. To him the cliff, high-rising above the foaming tide, the serpent gliding through the summer grass, the cool dark woodland path winding into arching leafy shadows, the brook and the narrow rocky pass, the red sunset and the crimson flower, gnarled roots and caverns, lakes, promontories, and headlands, will all have a strange meaning—not vague and mystical, but literal and expressive—a mutual and self-reflecting meaning, embodying all of the Beautiful that man loves best in life, and consecrated by the exquisite fables of a joyous mythology.

I have long thought that a work devoted to the natural poetry and antique mystery of such objects as occur most prominently in Nature would be acceptable to all lovers of the Beautiful. It would be worth the while, I should think, to all such, to know that every object, by land or sea, was once the subject of a myth, that this myth had a meaning founded in the deepest laws of life, and that all were curiously connected and mutually reflected in one vast system. It would be worth while to know, not only that dove and goblet, flower and ring were each the 'motive' of a graceful fable, but also that this fable was something more than merely fanciful or graceful—that it had a deep meaning, and that each and all were essential parts of one vast whole. And it would be pleasant, I presume, to see these myths and meanings somewhat illustrated by poem or proverb, or other literary ornament. What is here offered is, indeed, little more than a beginning—for the actual completion of such a work would involve the learning and labor, not of a man, but of an age. I trust, however, that these chapters may induce some curiosity and research into the marvels and mysteries of antique symbolism, and perhaps invest with a new interest many objects hitherto valued more for their external attractions than for their associations.

The reading world has for many years received with favor works purporting to teach with poetic illustration the Language of Flowers. But we learn from ancient lore that there is a secret language and a symbolism, not only of flowers, but of all natural objects. These objects, on one side, or from one point of view, all stand for each other, and are, in fact, synonymes—the whole representing singly the Venus-mystery of love and generation, or life. That is to say, this is what they do positively—for negatively, at the same time, and under the same forms, they also typify death, repulsion, darkness—even as the same word in Hebrew often means unity or harmony when read backward, and the reverse when taken forward. Why they represent opposites (the great opposites of existence, life and death, lust and loathing, darkness and light) is evident enough to any one who will reflect that each was intended to represent in itself all Nature, and that in Nature the great mystery of mysteries is the springing of death from life and of life from death by means of the agency of sexual action through vitality and light.

I would beg the reader to constantly bear in mind this fact when studying the symbolism and mythology of Nature—that among the ancients every object, beginning with the serpent, typified all that is, or all Nature, and consequently the opposites of Death and Life, united in one, as also the male and female principle, darkness and light, sleep and waking, and, in fact, all antagonisms. Even when, as in the case of the goat, the wild boar, or the Typhon serpent of the waters, destruction is more peculiarly implied, the fact that destruction is simply a preparation for fresh life was never forgotten. The destroying, undulating, wavy serpent of the waters was also the type of life, and wound around the staff of Escalapius as a healing emblem, recalling the brazen serpent of Moses. In like manner the Tree of Life or of Knowledge was the tree also of Death, or of Good and of Evil, arbor cogniti boni et mali, and, according to the Rabbis, of sexual generation, from eating of which the first parents became self-conscious. Beans, which were symbols of impurity and peculiarly identified with evil (Menke, De Leguminibus Veterum, Gottingen, 1814), were also typical of supporting life and of reviving spring and light. To see all reflected in each, and each in all, is, in fact, the key to all the mysteries of symbolism and the clue to the whole poetry of Nature.

I propose in the following chapters to discuss the poetry and mystery of flowers, herbs, and other objects, and give not only their ancient signification, but also their more modern meaning, as set forth in song and in tradition.

THE ROSE'I felix Rosa, mollibusque sertisNostri cinge comas Apollinaris.Quas tu nectere candidas, sed olim,Sic te semper amet Venus, memento!'Martial, Epig. 88, lib. 7.

Among the most exquisite outbreathings of feeling in Nature we have the Rose. Many flowers are in certain senses more beautiful, but as, among women, she who charms is not always the most highly gifted with conventional attractions, so it is with the Queen of the Garden, whose proud simplicity is delicately blended with a familiar, friendly grace, which wins by the tenderest spell of association.

Of all flowers, of all ages, in every land, the Rose has ever been most intimately connected with humanity—a sentiment so earnestly expressed and so lovingly repeated in the poetry, art, and myths of the olden time, that it would seem as if tradition had once recorded what science has only recently discovered, that this plant was coeval with Man. Inferior, indeed, to the sacred Lotus as a religious symbol, the Rose has always been superior to her sister of the silent waters as expressing the most delicate mysteries of Beauty and of Love. The Lotus, the only rival of the Rose in the early Nature-worship,2 furnished indeed in its name alone a solemn formula of faith which has been more frequently repeated than any other on earth. It was the flower of mystery, the primeval emblem of Pantheism in beauty, the blossom of the Morning Land. But the Rose belongs to the revellers and lovers in Persia, to the worship and banquets of the joyous Greeks, to those who meet in gardens by moonlight beside fountains, the children of Aphrodite the Foam-born.

From the earliest age the World of Thought has been disputed by two Spirits, and none are mightier than they. One, fearful in mysterious beauty, the Queen of all that is occult and inscrutable, rises in cloudy state from the antique Orient—from the Egypt of the Only Isis, and from the Avatar land of Brahma—solemnly breathing the love of the All in One. Infinitely lovely is the dark-browed Queen, and she bears in her hand the lotus. Against her, in laughing sunlight, amid green leaves and birdsong, waving merry warning, stands a brighter form—the incarnation of purely earthly beauty—for she is all of earth and life; the Spirit of the Actual and Material; and she is crowned with roses.

These are the Thought-Queens of Greece and India, of France and of Germany. But the Christianity of the middle ages declared that the flower was neither a Rose nor Lotus, and placed in the hand of its Queen of Heaven the Lily of Martyrdom!

Dear reader, sit among green leaves until the birds no longer fear you; or else peer from some quiet corner into your June garden, so that you may watch its blossoms unobserved—as the little damsel in the Danish tale did the dancing lilies. When the fever of life and self grows calm, a feeling will steal over you, as of wonder, that the flowers seem to be breathing and beautying for themselves, and not for man. A pure, holy life, quite apart from all ultimate destinies of bouquets and wreaths and human uses, seems to prevail among them. Each has its expression, its ineffably tender idea, not more clearly formulized, it is true, than those which music conveys, yet quite as delicious. One might say that they seem to talk together; but they do not think as we think or dream as we dream—not even symbolically. It will be long ere you appreciate more than their fresh joy of existence. But, little by little one herb and flower after the other becomes individualized—they are artists living themselves out into hues and lines and parts of a tableau; the vine draws itself in an arabesque which is perfect because self-forming; and the whole harmonize with the sway of sunlight and shadow, with rustling breeze and hurrying ant on the footpath, and chirping birds, so exquisitely that you may feel, as you never have in studying human art or in poetry, that tones, colors, curves, organisms form altogether, or separately, the effect of each other. If among them all there be a Rose, you will then find why it was that she was Flower Queen in Eden, and in all ages. No matter what rivals are present, the Rose will first suggest Woman—Woman in her most exquisite loveliness.

We find, indeed, in detail, that no flower furnishes so many obvious points of comparison to a fair girl. Its delicate tints of white and red are suggestive of her complexion, the bud is like prettily pouting lips, while the exquisite perfume is, especially among the excitable children of the East, the most daintily piquant of exotic stimulants. The Nature-worship of the early ages, which saw in all things the action of the male and female principles of generation, did not fail to discover in the mossy rose (as it had done in the cup, the ring, the gate, the mountain-path, and every other imaginable type of opening, passing through, and receiving) a striking symbol of the Queen of Love, and of her chief attribute. In accordance with the first rule of the first religion, which was to identify the male and female godheads in the Producer, they also discovered in the Rosebud a symbol of the male principle, or of germinating life, from which unchanged word, as has been thought, the name of Buddh' or Buddha was given—or taken.

As the flower dearest to Venus and the Graces—nay, in a certain sense, the very Venus herself, dew-dripping and odorous, the Rose soon shed the Aurora light to which it was compared, and its winning perfume, over every antique dream of love and beauty. It rises with the sea-foam when Aphrodite comes in pearly whiteness from the blue waters; or it is born of the blood of the dying Adonis when he—the type of summer beauty—dies by the tusk of the boar, the emblem of winter, of destruction, and of death; or it springs from the exquisitely pure and sacred drops incarnadine of the goddess herself when scratched by thorns, in pursuit of her darling. And as among the ancients, whether Etruscan or Egyptian, it was usual to celebrate the rites of Venus during banquets, the rose, with which the revellers and their goblets were crowned, became also the symbol of Dionysus—or of Bacchus. And as silence should be especially kept as to the secret pleasures of love and the favors of fair ladies, as well as to what is uttered when heated by wine, the rose was also hung up at all orgies to intimate silence—whence the expression sub rosa, 'under the rose.' And therefore Harpocrates, the god of silence and mystery (or of the secret productive force of Nature), bears this flower—the first emblem of 'still life'—silence as to the joys of love and wine.

'Let us the Rose of Love entwineRound the cheek-flushed god of wine:As the rose its gaudy leavesRound our twisted temples weaves,Let us sip the time away,Let us laugh as blithe as they.'Rose, oh rose, the gem of flowers!Rose, the care of vernal hours!Rose, of every god the joy!With roses Venus' darling boyLinks the Graces in a roundWith him in flowery fetters bound.'With roses, Bacchus, crown my head:The lyre in hand thy courts I'll tread,And, with some full-bosomed maid,Dance, nodding with the rosy braid,That veils me with its clustered shade.'Anacreon.

The study of mythologic symbolism gives a thousand indications that in prehistoric ages, among the worshippers of the Serpent and the Fire, all the deepest feelings of men, whether artistic, religious, or sensual, were concentrated on the real or fancied affinities of natural objects with an earnestness of which we of the present age have no conception. Poetry, as it exists for us, is a pretty rococo fancy; to the worshippers and framers of myths it was a truth of tremendous significance. To such minds a Rose freshly blowing was a symbol, not merely of Divinity in a barren, abstract manner, but of Divinity in its most vivid and fascinating forms. It was GOD, male and female, manifested as love, as perfume, and as light. Believing that every flower on earth was the reflection of an arch-typal star in heaven, they honored the Rose by holding that as a flower it was generated by and reflected the sun, and the morning star, and, in fact, the moon also. So, in a poem of the Arab Meflana Dschelaledin:

'The full rose, in its glory, is like the sun,Thou seest all its leaves, each like unto the moon.'

It was therefore one of the flowers of Light. Its color was that of the Aurora—not in Homer alone, but in all ancient song, Dawn is rosy-fingered, rosy-hued. This resemblance to the morning is beautifully set forth by Ausonius:

'There Pæstan roses blushed before my view,Bedropped with early morning's freshening dew;'Twere doubtful if the blossoms of the roseHad robbed the morning, or the morning those:In dew, in tint the same, the star and flower,For both confess the Queen of Beauty's power.Perchance their sweets the same; but this more nighExhales its breath, while that embalms the sky:Of flower and star the goddess is the same,And both she tinged with hues of roseate flame.'

As the warmest floral type of love, of light, of revelling, and of the glowing dawn, the Rose became naturally the symbol of Youth. Here again, some decided resemblance was, as usual, required, and it was found in the Blush, the most characteristic, as well as the most beautiful, indication of affinity in early life between the moral and physical nature. Youth is the rose-time of love, the June of its summer; its hours are those of the morning-star of life, and of its dawn; the lover is the bud, the bride the blushing flower expanding in perfume. Every resemblance in it refers to incipient life. The Bud is God, or Buddh', as the procreating deity, while the opening flower is the conceiving Aphrodite. All is early and transitory. The tendency of roses to quickly fade has given the poets of every land a most obvious simile for 'fleeting youth.'

'Go, lovely rose!Tell her that wastes her time and me,That now she knows,When I resemble her to thee,How sweet and fair she seems to be!'Then die, that sheThe common fate of all things rareMay read in thee—How small a part of time they shareThat are so wondrous sweet and rare.'

In connection with youth, freshness, and blushes, the rose became, naturally enough, a type of reality and of natural truth. So in Hafiz:

'Can cheeks where living roses blow,Where nature spreads her richest dyes,Require the borrowed gloss of Art?'

The deepest and most solemn mystery which the Nature-love of the earliest times attached to every object, was that it reflected its very opposite, and must always be regarded as identified with it in a primitive origin, in which both existed undeveloped. So we have seen that the rose, while female as the expanding flower, was yet male as the contracted bud. As a symbol of joyousness, youth, light, beauty, and the blushing dawn, it was eminently the floral type of life—a simile which has been employed by the poets of every land, Spenser among others:

'The whiles some one did chant this lovely lay:Ah see, who so fair thing dost fain to see,In springing flower the image of thy day;All see thy virgin ROSE, how sweetly sheDoth first peep forth with bashful modesty,That fairer seems the less you see her may;Lo! see soon after, how more bold and freeHer bared bosom she doth broad display;Lo! see soon after, how she fades and falls away.'So passeth, in the passing of a dayOf mortal life, the leaf, the bud, the flower,Nor more doth flourish after first decay,That erst was sought to deck both bed and bowerOf many a lady, many a paramour:Gather the rose of love while yet in time,Whilst loving thou may'st loved be with equal crime.'

But, as implying Life, the Rose also reflected Death, and this seemed to ray from the cruel thorns, which, as the German couplet says, remain after the leaves have vanished:

'The rose falls away,But the thorns ever stay.'

And a far older Hindu proverb solemnly exclaims: 'Hast thou obtained thy wish; exult not: canst thou not see how the thorn pierces the finger at the same instant when the rose is gathered?'

Birth and Death, as typified in the Rose, and their mutual production, are beautifully expressed by Ausonius in the remainder of the poem already cited:

'I saw a moment's interval divideThe rose that blossomed from the rose that died.This with its cap of tufted moss looked green;That, tipped with reddening purple, peeped between;One reared its obelisk with opening swell,The bud unsheathed its crimson pinnacle;Another, gathering every purpled fold,Its foliage multiplied; its blooms unrolled,The teeming chives shot forth; the petals spread;The bow-pot's glory reared its smiling head;While this, that ere the passing moment flewFlamed forth one blaze of scarlet on the view,Now shook from withering stalk the waste perfume,Its verdure stript, and pale its faded bloom,I marvelled at the spoiling flight of time,That roses thus grew old in earliest prime.E'en while I speak, the crimson leaves drop round,And a red brightness veils the blushing ground.These forms, these births, these changes, bloom, decay,Appear and vanish in the self-same day.The flower's brief grace, O Nature! moves my sighs,Thy gifts, just shown, are ravished from our eyes.One day the rose's age; and while it blowsIn dawn of youth, it withers to its close.The rose the glittering sun beheld at morn,Spread to the light its blossoms newly born,When in his round he looks from evening skiesAlready droops in age, and fades, and dies.Yet blest that, soon to fade, the numerous flowerSucceeds herself, and still prolongs her hour.O virgins! roses cull, while yet ye may;So bloom your hours, and so shall haste away.'

A Jewish legend declares that a famed cabalist was vainly pursued by Death through many forms. But at last the grim enemy changed himself into the perfume of a rose, which the magician—his suspicion lulled for the instant—inhaled, and died. In many German cities—Hildesheim, Bremen, and Lübeck among others—it is said that the death of a prebend is heralded by the discovery of a white rose under his seat in the cathedral. 'And,' as J. B. Friederich states (Symbolik und Mythologie der Natur, p. 225), 'in the Tyrol the rose has a deathly meaning, since it is there believed that whoever wears an Alpine rose in his hat during a thunderstorm will be struck by the lightning; for which reason it is called the thunder-rose—a name probably derived from the consecration of that flower to Donar, the god of thunder.'

The fantastic symbolism of the middle ages twined the Rose into innumerable capricious forms, few of which, however, have any direct derivation from Nature. Thus the Rose, from being typical of literal love, became that of Christ; from symbolizing the light of Aurora, it was made significant as the rose-window bearing the cross. The five-leaved rose indicated the love of God for Man, as set forth by His five wounds; while the eight-leaved typified that of the believer for the Lord. The Rose also emblemed the Virgin Mary, and from her was reflected through countless works of art and many legends, all of which are 'tenderly beautiful,' and, it may be added, generally rather silly—as, for instance, that of the holy friar Josbert of Doel, who sang daily five hymns in honor of the Virgin; in reward of which, immediately after his death, there grew from his mouth, ears, and nostrils, five roses, each marked with the words of a hymn. It has been usual to say much, of late years, of the 'child-like and earnest,' 'tender and trusting' spirit which inspired these saintly legends, and to praise with them the morbid delicacy of a Fra Angelico. Believe me, reader, when I say that no vigorous and healthy mind ever passed through a period of adoration for and cultivation of mediæval Roman Catholic Art, who did not eventually see that this naïve and innocent art-expression of the foulest, darkest, and most oppressive stage of history, had precisely the same foundation in truth as the love of the French court during the days of the Regency for a shepherd's life and child-like rural pleasures. A wicked and degraded age seeks for relief in contemplating its opposite; a healthy one—like the Greek—glories in itself, and strives to raise self to the highest standard of truth and beauty. None of the symbolisms of the middle ages grew directly from Nature—it was based on second-hand reveries, and on emblems from which all juice and life had been drained ages before in the East.