ladies still collect their roses, and which points in its name to the round cup of the narcissus-flower.

Willow-twigs would no doubt be employed also, as at the present day, as a substitute for cords; and it can scarcely be disputed that osiers such as these were the "withs" which Samson proposed to the Philistines as a test for his muscles. "If they bind me with seven green withs that were never dried, then I shall be weak, and be as another man" (Judges xvi. 7). The word in the original is yetharim, literally "cords," but the epithets "green" and "never dried" imply pretty conclusively that they were the tough yet supple shoots of some living and vigorous shrub, and nothing would so well suit the purpose as willow-twigs, which are often like wire. To this day they are constantly employed as powerful ligatures for coarse purposes; and yetharim seems itself the ancestor of the Anglo-Saxon withan to bind, and our own withy.1

But the shaded pathway by the river is not consecrated alone to pensive musing and to mourners. Often is it a witness of the loved and lingering stroll that on the banks of many a "bonnie Doun" serves for a brief summer-evening paradise; and in warm countries especially, the luxuriance of the green life induced by the running water, the showery flakes of unsoiled foliage wafting delicately with the least touch of the wind, and the natural arbours that river-bank trees are apt to form, must always render the shade of such trees particularly inviting. Hence may we understand why Venus, talking to Adonis, and desiring to rest in pleasant shelter from the heat of the sun, while she relates to him the story of Atalanta, is wooed to it (blanditur) by a poplar.2 And was it not because she had many a time roamed where "ilka bird sang o' its love," that a river-side poplar bore the name, on its bark, of poor none? This luxuriance of waterfed willows renders them at the same time fitting images of life and prosperity. Hence the beautiful comparison in Isaiah, "They shall spring up among the grass, as orebim by the water-courses" (xliv. 4). Here, however, we must again fall back upon the probably collective sense of orebim, and assume it to include, as it almost certainly does, various shrubs and small trees, sufficiently like the willow in general aspect to allow of the whole being popularly classed together. Among these were probably the oleander, the oleaster, and perhaps the agnuscastus, which last Hasselquist expressly counts among the willows, or, in his own words, "plants with pliant shoots." These three plants will be noticed presently. Whatever the precise meaning of the word, the propriety of the illustration remains intact.

What were the particular orebim present to the mind of the author of the Book of Job, when writing his famous description of Behemoth, it is impossible to say. "He lieth under the shady trees, in the

1 With the ancient Romans osiers were used for the making of beehives, as appears from Virgil (Georgic iv. 34), who has many allusions to salices and saliceta. The hibiscus of this author (Ecl. ii. 30, x. 71) was also, probably, some kind of osier. 2 Met. x. 555.

H

covert of the reed and fens; the shady trees cover him with their shadow; the orebim of the brook compass him round about (xl. 21, 22). What "behemoth" itself denotes is not quite clear. Like that of so many of the biblical names of plants, the sense is probably plural and collective, and the term a poetical personification of the attributes of the largest and most astonishing of the pachydermata that were known to the writer, both the hippopotamus and the elephant being indicated in different clauses of the description. Elsewhere the same word is applied to cattle:-"For every beast of the field is Mine, and the behemoth upon a thousand hills" (Ps. 1. 50).

So with the orebim which were commanded to be used at the Feast of Tabernacles :—“Ye shall take you on the first day the boughs of goodly trees, branches of palm-trees, and boughs of thick trees, and willows of the brook, and rejoice before the Lord your God seven days" (Lev. xxiii. 40). Something rich in the fulness of life assuredly they would be, and that would continue green and cheerful for a week.

It is proper to add that while the name of "mulberry" is erroneously used in the Authorized Version instead of poplar, the latter word itself is mistakenly introduced in each of the two places of its occurrence, viz., Gen. xxx. 37 and Hosea iv. 13, where the Hebrew libneh seems to stand really for the storax-tree, as will be noticed in due course. It may be well to add also, in regard to the Holy Land poplars of the present day, that the aspen is said to "unite with the willow and the oak (the Ilex ?) to overshadow the water-courses of the Lower Lebanon," and to "unite again with the oleander and the acacia to adorn the ravines of southern Palestine." "Willows and poplars," says Dean Stanley, "hang over the rushing volume of the Barada at Damascus."

25. THE OLEANDER (Nerium Oleander. Nat. Ord. Apocynacea). Assuming this to be included in the orebim, when that word is employed in connection with ideas of luxuriance and vigorous life, the plant vindicates itself in continuing to afford one of the most beautiful botanical spectacles that Palestine possesses. Fringing every watercourse, it attracts the attention of every traveller, alike in the deep green of its plentiful foliage, and in the rich and rose-like complexion of the flowers. No shrub excels it, except perhaps the crimson rhododendron of the Himalayahs (the Rhododendron arboreum of botanists), and it is interesting to note that it was to the oleander, this identical and splendid Holy Land species, that the very name of rhododendron, signifying" rose" or "red-flowered" tree, was first applied. "Nerium or rhododendron," says Dioscorides (iv. 82). It was also called rhododaphne or "rose-laurel," whence the modern synonym "rose-bay." Sibthorp describes it as common in damp and shady places in Greece, and delighting to grow beside torrents; and in his magnificent work, the Flora Græca, gives a capital drawing of the foliage and the great coronal of pink blossoms (iii. p. 248). To the ancient Greeks it must have been an object no less familiar than it was to the Hebrews, and there can be little doubt that it was one of the plants to which they

gave the name of pódov, or that which translators are accustomed to render by "rose." In Palestine, Mr. Tristram tells us, the oleander sometimes becomes a "timber-tree," the trunk acquiring the thickness of a man's body, and attaining the height of twenty-five feet, while the long, slim, fluent boughs are borne down, like those of an overloaded fruit-tree, by the weight of the gorgeous rosy bloom. "Sometimes it mingles with tall reeds by the bright and dashing streams; sometimes, in company with young planes, it forms deeply-shaded labyrinths; and when near water, is apt to become stilted upon a yard or more of its own long and leafless understructure of stem and aerial root, after the manner of the mangrove of the tropics, towering above the shrubs which surround it, and presenting a bouquet of green throughout the year." Such a spectacle might well supply the beautiful image just now cited from the prophet, an image that will bear a thousand repetitions, when Jehovah, comforting the Church with His promises, and thus, by implication, the righteous in every age and every country, adds, " And their offspring shall spring up among the grass, as willows by the water-courses.' No one can possibly connect words like these with the "weeping" willow, or with any kind of tree but one remarkable for its cheerful fecundity in aspiring life.

Possibly the oleander may be the tree had in view by the Psalmist when he compares the man whose " "delight is in the law of the Lord" to a tree planted by rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither." The oleander being an evergreen, would so far, at all events, render it suitable as an emblem; and though it does not produce a fruit eatable by man, the bloom that flows forth so regularly and freely, with the seed-pods that follow in due course, are to all intents and purposes, as a poetical image, fruit in season. The “his,” it is scarcely necessary to say, refers to the tree, and not, as some have supposed, to the man; the pronoun "its," as applied to objects of the neuter gender, having scarcely come into use when the version of Scripture we call the Authorized was put into form. All things, in the ancient languages, were either "he" or "she;" the distinction is founded on the original harmonies of the objects of nature and though the grammarians and modern usages have nearly effaced it, poetry and Scripture, let us be thankful, will never let it die entirely.1

It seems quite probable that the oleander may not only have constituted a portion of the orebim, but have been intended in the allusions to the rose which occur in the Book of Ecclesiasticus, where the word in the original is the Greek pódov. "I was exalted," says the Preacher,

1 The arbitrary classification of nouns into masculine and feminine, because of their having certain terminations, as practised in French, is of course another matter altogether, and has nothing to do with the natural harmonies that were acknowledged in the original assignations. See the chapter on Personification and the Genders of Words, in the author's "Figurative Language, its Origin and Constitution."

"like a palm-tree in Engaddi, and as a rose-plant in Jericho" (xxiv. 14). Also in xxxix. 13, "and bud forth as a rose growing by the brook of the field;" while in 1. 8, the ornaments worn by the highpriest are compared to "the flowers of roses in the spring of the year." Another passage, in the Book of Wisdom (xi. 8), quite brings to mind certain lines in the classical poets-"Let us crown ourselves with roses before they be withered." Now, to get at the real application and significance of the word employed in these verses, we must think, not from the rose as we have it in English gardens, but from the sense of the word pódov as employed in ancient secular literature, premising that the rose, true and genuine, does not grow specially by brooksides, even in its native countries, and that it is by no means emphatically a flower of the spring. The vicinity of Jericho, moreover, does not seem ever to have been noted for bona fide roses, nor is the seething and sub-tropical climate of the neighbourhood in the least degree favourable to their growth. The etymological meaning of the word pódov is "redness," such as that of poppies and the pomegranate flower it is from the same original root that we have our own words "red" and ruddy," and to the same is also referable the Latin rutilus, the 8 being exchanged, as in innumerable other instances, for a t. The sense of the word is shown in the pretty epithet of " rosy-cheeked," an epithet as old as the time of Theocritus, who uses it in his twentythird Idyll, and which simply means deep blush colour, without reference to any particular flower, rose, pomegranate, or anything else. Red flowers in general evidently received the collective name of "roses" at a very early period, and as red flowers are the most showy and conspicuous of any, the name soon and very naturally became extended to flowers of all descriptions, precisely in the same way that "lily" became extended. Relics of the ancient practice exist to this very day. One of the handsomest and deepest-hued of the rose-like Malvacea is the Hibiscus Rosa-Sinensis; with some, the camellia is the Japan-rose; the crimson poppy that springs among the cereals, the corn-rose; the wild scabious, the gipsy-rose: and the white hellebore of mid-winter, the Christmas-rose. In this light is to be taken the charming metaphor of Pindar, when, after comparing domestic trouble and adversity to winter and a snow-storm, he exclaims, "But now this happy household, like the spring, has blossomed with purple roses.' The epithet "purple," it must be remembered, was with the ancients used not only to designate a particular tint or colour; it also denoted bright, luminous or effulgent, and in this latter sense it is that Pindar, so renowned for his figurative expressions, employs it in

113

2

1 This celebrated composition, the Book of Wisdom, is believed to have been written about B.C. 180, originally in Hebrew, and to have been translated into Greek about B.C. 130. It is quite possible that the translator may have been acquainted with the secular literature of the language, and have had his mind influenced by its style and spirit.

Compare Gueldres-rose, rock-rose, rose of Barbadoes, etc.

3 Isth. iii. 30.

3

the verses quoted.1 Virgil has it in precisely the same sense, ver purpureum, "shining spring," and elsewhere applies it to the white narcissus, one of the most lucid of white flowers. Horace gives it, in the same fashion, to the swan ; and if we care to note how changeless are these usages, and how in the alembic of modern thought they gather new life and take new shapes, we need but call to mind that splendid phrase in Victor Hugo, "The purple hue of heroism overspread the barricade." Many passages similar to that in Pindar might be quoted in proof that with the ancients "roses" meant flowers in general. One of the most charming occurs in that sweet picture, where we have the bevy of little maids at play upon the shore, delighting in the sound of the dimpling sea, and culling "roses" for their companion, who presently is borne away by the snow-white bull. Perhaps the literalist will insist that these were the creamy bloom of the Rosa pimpinellifolia, the delicate little rose, everywhere, of the seaside sandhills. But it is too prickly for a plaything, even in poetry, and one cannot but think, in pausing on it, of the ancient myth which relates that the rose (the rose pur et simple) was originally white, and acquired its colour from the blood of Venus, shed through inadvertently treading upon the thorns. It needs only to add that the Egyptian water-lily, with the ancients, bore for one of its names the rose of the Nile; and that what is true of pódov is true in other languages. In Persia, for instance, the celebrated word gul or ghul, definitely a true rose-whence atar ghul, or otto of roses, and the line,

"Know ye the gardens of gul in their bloom,"

in its wide and original sense, denotes flowers of any kind that are distinguished for their redness. Hence the beautiful feminine name Gulnare, the oriental equivalent of our loveable English "rosycheeked." Hence, too, the term employed in the Crusaders' heraldry to denote red, which is gules, otherwise unmeaning and untranslateable.

That the ancients possessed genuine roses is of course in no way disputed or controverted, though it is extremely doubtful if they had any of the varieties inconsistently called white roses. They had that queenly and incomparable flower, the deep-hearted and full-bosomed Rosa centifolia, commonly called by the ugly name of the "cabbage rose;" also the Damascus or damask rose; perhaps also the North African musk-rose, and the species which to-day is called the Rosa Gallica. All these they esteemed as they deserve to be, but it was not until the time of the later Roman consulate that roses, properly and absolutely so called, appear to have acquired the popularity of

1 Compare "purple-flowered spring," in Pyth. iv. 114, used as the symbol of a state of prosperity. And as illustrating how the ideas of flowers and redness go together, the epithet "florid" or flower-like, as applied to a deep-coloured human

countenance.

2 Ecl. ix. 40.

5 Les Misérables.

3 Ecl. v. 38.

4 Odes, iv. 1, 10. 6 Moschus, Idyll 2, 35, 36.