Dear reader, sit among green leaves until the birds no longer fear you; or else peer from some quiet corner into your June garden, so that you may watch its blossoms unobserved--as the little damsel in the Danish tale did the dancing lilies. When the fever of life and self grows calm, a feeling will steal over you, as of wonder, that the flowers seem to be breathing and beautying _for themselves_, and not for man. A pure, holy life, quite apart from all ultimate destinies of bouquets and wreaths and human uses, seems to prevail among them. Each has its expression, its ineffably tender idea, not more clearly formulized, it is true, than those which music conveys, yet quite as delicious. One might say that they seem to talk together; but they do not think as we think or dream as we dream--not even symbolically. It will be long ere you appreciate more than their fresh joy of existence. But, little by little one herb and flower after the other becomes individualized--they are artists living themselves out into hues and lines and parts of a tableau; the vine draws itself in an arabesque which is perfect _because_ self-forming; and the whole harmonize with the sway of sunlight and shadow, with rustling breeze and hurrying ant on the footpath, and chirping birds, so exquisitely that you may feel, as you never have in studying human art or in poetry, that tones, colors, curves, organisms _form_ altogether, or separately, the effect of each other. If among them all there be a Rose, you will then find _why_ it was that she was Flower Queen in Eden, and in all ages. No matter what rivals are present, the Rose will first suggest _Woman_--Woman in her most exquisite loveliness. We find, indeed, in detail, that no flower furnishes so many obvious points of comparison to a fair girl. Its delicate tints of white and red are suggestive of her complexion, the bud is like prettily pouting lips, while the exquisite perfume is, especially among the excitable children of the East, the most daintily piquant of exotic stimulants. The Nature-worship of the early ages, which saw in all things the action of the male and female principles of generation, did not fail to discover in the mossy rose (as it had done in the cup, the ring, the gate, the mountain-path, and every other imaginable type of opening, passing through, and receiving) a striking symbol of the Queen of Love, and of her chief attribute. In accordance with the first rule of the first religion, which was to identify the male and female godheads in the Producer, they also discovered in the Rosebud a symbol of the male principle, or of germinating life, from which unchanged word, as has been thought, the name of Buddh' or Buddha was given--or taken.