THE TULIP.

    Tulips, like the ruddy evening streaked.

Southey.

The TULIP (tulipa) is the glory of the garden, as far as color without fragrance can confer such distinction.  Some suppose it to be ’The Lily of the Field’ alluded to in the Sermon on the Mount.  It grows wild in Syria.

The name of the tulip is said to be of Turkish origin.  It was called Tulipa from its resemblance to the tulipan or turban.

    What crouds the rich Divan to-day
    With turbaned heads, of every hue
    Bowing before that veiled and awful face
    Like Tulip-beds of different shapes and dyes,
    Bending beneath the invisible west wind’s sighs?

Moore.

The reader has probably heard of the Tulipomania once carried to so great an excess in Holland.

    With all his phlegm, it broke a Dutchman’s heart,
    At a vast price, with one loved root to part.

Crabbe.

About the middle of the 17th century the city of Haarlem realized in three years ten millions sterling by the sale of tulips.  A single tulip (the Semper Augustus) was sold for one thousand pounds.  Twelve acres of land were given for a single root and engagements to the amount of L5,000 were made for a first-class tulip when the mania was at its height.  A gentleman, who possessed a tulip of great value, hearing that some one was in possession of a second root of the same kind, eagerly secured it at a most extravagant price.  The moment he got possession of it, he crushed it under his foot.  “Now,” he exclaimed, “my tulip is unique!”

A Dutch Merchant gave a sailor a herring for his breakfast.  Jack seeing on the Merchant’s counter what he supposed to be a heap of onions, took up a handful of them and ate them with his fish.  The supposed onions were tulip bulbs of such value that they would have paid the cost of a thousand Royal feasts.[079]

The tulip mania never leached so extravagant a height in England as in Holland, but our country did not quite escape the contagion, and even so late as the year 1836 at the sale of Mr. Clarke’s tulips at Croydon, seventy two pounds were given for a single bulb of the Fanny Kemble; and a Florist in Chelsea in the same year, priced a bulb in his catalogue at 200 guineas.

The Tulip is not endeared to us by many poetical associations.  We have read, however, one pretty and romantic tale about it.  A poor old woman who lived amongst the wild hills of Dartmoor, in Devonshire, possessed a beautiful bed of Tulips, the pride of her small garden.  One fine moonlight night her attention was arrested by the sweet music which seemed to issue from a thousand Liliputian choristers.  She found that the sounds proceeded from her many colored bells of Tulips.  After watching the flowers intently she perceived that they were not swayed to and fro by the wind, but by innumerable little beings that