Jasmine.... Amiability.
Reading edition
The Jasmine is a happy emblem of an amiable disposition. In all situations, it suffers the gardener to train its slender branches into any form he chooses: most commonly forming a living tapestry for arbours and garden walls, and everywhere throwing out a profusion of delicate and charming flowers, which perfume the air. The poets have showered their praise upon this plant, and all unite in considering it the emblem of the winsome quality of amiability. After paying a glowing tribute to the beauty and sweetness of the Violet, Thomas Miller, the “basket-maker” poet, thus speaks of the Jasmine:—
Stepping further into summer, comes the star-white Jasmine,—that sweet perfumer of the night, which only throws out its full fragrance when its sister stars are keeping watch in the sky; as if, when the song of the nightingale no longer cheered the darkness, it sent forth its silent aroma upon the listening air. Many a happy home does it garland, and peeps in at many a forbidden lattice, where Love and Beauty repose. Little did the proud courtiers and stately dames of Queen Elizabeth’s day dream that this sweet-scented creeper (a sprig of which seemed to make the haughty haughtier still) would one day become so common as to cluster around and embower thousands of humble English cottages,—a degradation which, could they but have witnessed, would almost have made every plait of their starched ruffs bristle up, like “quills upon the fretful porcupine.” Beautiful are its long, drooping, dark-green shoots, trailing around the trellis-work of a door-way, like a green curtain embroidered with silver flowers; while here and there the queenly Moss-Rose, creeping in and out like the threads of a fanciful tapestry, its crimson face amid the embowered green,—a beautiful lady peeping through a leaf-clad casement.
A lover on the Indian Sea, Sighing for her left far behind, Inhaled the scented Jasmine tree, As it perfumed the evening wind: Shoreward he steered at dawn of day, And saw the coast all round embowered, And brought a starry sprig away, For her by whose green cot it flowered. And oft when from that scorching shore, In after years those odours came, He pictured his green cottage door, The shady porch, and window-frame, Far, far away, across the foam: The very Jasmine-flower that crept Round the thatched roof about his home, Where she he loved then safely slept. Miller.