“The rose o’er crag or vale,
  Sultana of the nightingale,
   The maid for whom his melody,
   His thousand songs are heard on high,
  Blooms blushing to her lover’s tale,
  His queen, the garden queen, his rose,
  Unbent by winds, unchilled by snows.”

Thackeray, too, has given a pleasing rendering of this favourite legend:—­

  “Under the boughs I sat and listened still,
   I could not have my fill. 
  ‘How comes,’ I said, ’such music to his bill? 
  Tell me for whom he sings so beautiful a trill.’

  ‘Once I was dumb,’ then did the bird disclose,
   ’But looked upon the rose,
  And in the garden where the loved one grows,
  I straightway did begin sweet music to compose.’”

Mrs. Browning, in her “Lay of the Early Rose,” alludes to this legend, and Moore in his “Lalla Rookh” asks:—­

  “Though rich the spot
   With every flower this earth has got,
  What is it to the nightingale,
   If there his darling rose is not?”

But the rose is not the only plant for which the nightingale is said to have a predilection, there being an old notion that its song is never heard except where cowslips are to be found in profusion.  Experience, however, only too often proves the inaccuracy of this assertion.  We may also quote the following note from Yarrell’s “British Birds” (4th ed., i. 316):—­“Walcott, in his ‘Synopsis of British Birds’ (vol. ii. 228), says that the nightingale has been observed to be met with only where the cowslip grows kindly, and the assertion receives a partial approval from Montagu; but whether the statement be true or false, its converse certainly cannot be maintained, for Mr. Watson gives the cowslip (Primula veris) as found in all the ‘provinces’ into which he divides Great Britain, as far north as Caithness and Shetland, where we know that the nightingale does not occur.”  A correspondent of Notes and Queries (5th Ser. ix. 492) says that in East Sussex, on the borders of Kent, “the cowslip is quite unknown, but nightingales are as common as blackberries there.”

A similar idea exists in connection with hops; and, according to a tradition current in Yorkshire, the nightingale made its first appearance in the neighbourhood of Doncaster when hops were planted.  But this, of course, is purely imaginary, and in Hargrove’s “History of Knaresborough” (1832) we read:  “In the opposite wood, called Birkans Wood (opposite to the Abbey House), during the summer evenings, the nightingale:—­

  ’Sings darkling, and, in shadiest covert hid,
  Tunes her nocturnal lay.’”

Of the numerous stories connected with the origin of the mistletoe, one is noticed by Lord Bacon, to the effect that a certain bird, known as the “missel-bird,” fed upon a particular kind of seed, which, through its incapacity to digest, it evacuated whole, whereupon the seed, falling on the boughs of trees, vegetated and produced the mistletoe.  The magic springwort, which reveals hidden treasures, has a mysterious connection with the woodpecker, to which we have already referred.  Among further birds which are in some way or other connected with plants is the eagle, which plucks the wild lettuce, with the juice of which it smears its eyes to improve its vision; while the hawk was supposed, for the same purpose, to pluck the hawk-bit.