I shall close the poetical quotations on the Rose with one of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

    O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem,
    By that sweet ornament which truth doth give. 
    The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
    For that sweet odour which doth in it live. 
    The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye
    As the perfumed tincture of the roses,
    Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly,
    When summer’s breath their masked buds discloses;
    But for their virtue only is their show,
    They live unwoo’d and unrespected fade;
    Die to themselves.  Sweet Roses do not so;
    Of then sweet deaths are sweetest odours made: 
    And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
    When that shall fade, my verse distils your truth.

There are many hundred acres of rose trees at Ghazeepore which are cultivated for distillation, and making “attar.”  There are large fields of roses in England also, for the manufacture of rose-water.

There is a story about the origin of attar of Roses.  The Princess Nourmahal caused a large tank, on which she used to be rowed about with the great Mogul, to be filled with rose-water.  The heat of the sun separating the water from the essential oil of the rose, the latter was observed to be floating on the surface.  The discovery was immediately turned to good account.  At Ghazeepoor, the essence, atta or uttar or otto, or whatever it should be called, is obtained with great simplicity and ease.  After the rose water is prepared it is put into large open vessels which are left out at night.  Early in the morning the oil that floats upon the surface is skimmed off, or sucked up with fine dry cotton wool, put into bottles, and carefully sealed.  Bishop Heber says that to produce one rupee’s weight of atta 200,000 well grown roses are required, and that a rupee’s weight sells from 80 to 100 rupees.  The atta sold in Calcutta is commonly adulterated with the oil of sandal wood.

LINNAEA BOREALIS

The LINNAEA BOREALIS, or two horned Linnaea, though a simple Lapland flower, is interesting to all botanists from its association with the name of the Swedish Sage.  It has pretty little bells and is very fragrant.  It is a wild, unobtrusive plant and is very averse to the trim lawn and the gay flower-border.  This little woodland beauty pines away under too much notice.  She prefers neglect, and would rather waste her sweetness on the desert air, than be introduced into the fashionable lists of Florist’s flowers.  She shrinks from exposure to the sun.  A gentleman after walking with Linnaeus on the shores of the lake near Charlottendal on a lovely evening, writes thus “I gathered a small flower and asked if it was the Linnaea borealis.  ‘Nay,’ said the philosopher, ’she lives not here, but in the middle of our largest woods.  She clings with her little arms to the moss, and seems to resist very gently if you force her from it.  She has a complexion like a milkmaid, and ah! she is very, very sweet and agreeable!”