THE FLOWER THAT LOVES THE SHADE.

THE natural history of the Bible is, with all its uncertainties, a fascinating subject, and without some knowledge of it, full many a flower is passed unseen, and some even delicious fruit.

No less than with us in the West, the rose is the favourite flower of the Eastern poet. With him the bulbul and the rose, companions of the spring, are lovers ; and the songs of their nightingale are only love-warblings to the rose. With Hafez, pleasure is 'the rose of life,' and the voluptuary in Israel sung to the same tune: And let no flower of the spring pass by us; let us crown ourselves with rose-buds ere they be withered.' The rose of Sharon is said to vie with her of Damascus, as the beauty of the East; and yet this queen of flowers however orient of hue, and passing redolent,' is not the favourite of the Holy Scriptures. Twice only in our version do we meet with the rose, but learned foreigners more than question that version in either instance. Our ears indeed are so accustomed to the sweetness of that air,—" and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose," that we feel loath to relinquish the idea. Bishop Lowth retains it, yet without note or comment; but the Chaldee paraphrast there has it, "and they shall flourish as lilies." This is one place, but if the paraphrast be right there, as he is, then he is wrong in the other, where he has interpreted the selfsame word, the rose. Yet in the latter place also, there

is even internal evidence, that the only flower mentioned is the lily.

And hence per

This is indeed the sacred flower of holy writ, the lily. To that the heathen poet compares his Venus, for its beauty; but the Holy Spirit has adopted it, not for its beauty only, but especially for its colour, as the symbol of purity and of prosperous times. The very music of the temple, in the 45th Psalm for instance--that song of loves-was set 'for the lilies;' for so it seems they called their hexachords. The laver of the temple, set on a square base, was a circular cup, whose brim was like that of the cup of a lily flower. haps the apparent inconsistency between two places in holy writ may be reconciled; if we understand that the contents of the whole cavity might have held three thousand baths, but that the incisions which formed its hexagon brim, reduced them to two thousand. The columns of the temple were finished, somewhere about the chapiters, with wrought work which represented the lily-flower. Thus the lily was everywhere about the temple, both without and within. The favourite winter retreat of the monarchs of Persia was Susa, so called from the abundance of lilies there, but the Susa of the King of kings, his favourite retreat, was in the land of promise, and there it might truly be said of the Royal Shepherd, the Divine, “He feedeth among the lilies.”

But is there no rose in Sharon? In Sharon there is an abundance, but in any song of Scripture there seems to be not one. "A little attention to the context,' says Bishop Percy, will convince us, that the bride does not mean to extol her charms, but rather the contrary. She represents her beauty as merely that of a wild flower.' 'I am, says she, a flower of Sharon that loves the shade, a lily of the valleys.' The bridegroom replies ;—

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"As the lily among thorns, so is my love among daughters." He mentions the lily only; not a syllable of the rose. And she rejoins; "As the citron-tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my palate." His was the shade she loved. The citron-tree furnished a proper name to two of the cities of Israel; and that goodly tree, of whose fruit Israel should partake under her bowery shade at the feast of Tabernacles, was the citrontree; whose fruit at that feast is to this day in great request. In short, most of the ancient interpreters of the song, understood the lily to be the only flower in question.

“Consider,” said our Lord himself, "the lilies of the field. How do they grow? They toil not, they spin not, and yet I say unto you that even Solomon, in all his glory, was not adorned as one of these." Not so richly arrayed, not so exquisitely perfumed. The white lily of our gardens seems to be always meant; and no where fairer, no where more common were they than in that garden of Eden, the land of promise; that type of a still better country, with reference to which it is said, "Happy the meek, for they shall inherit the land!"

But of all parts of the promised land, nowhere did the lily flourish more than in the valley plains of Sharon, or Saron; both in that district, so called, between Mount Tabor and the lake, and in that also which extended along the Mediterranean from Mount Carmel to Joppa; and whose name seems to have been derived from the oak-forests which anciently grew there: there lay the moist pastures, there stood the oak-shades, and among them the citron-trees, which the lily loved. Now,

it was throughout those parts that St. Peter passed when he went down also to the saints who resided at Lydda. Thence his cure of the paralytic was reported throughout Saron; and at Joppa, hard by, lived and died,' “ full of good works, and alms-deeds, which she did," that flower of Saron (brief is the lily), that gazelle of the plains, that disciple who, whether maid, wife, or widow, may be esteemed as the mother of the Christian sisterhood of Charity.

One may imagine her life. She was "the flower of Sharon that loved the shade." She exhibited the Hebrew model of a virtuous woman. "She seeketh wool and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands." Glad of her labours, she was one of those "wise-hearted women," who spun with her hands for the spiritual temple of the Lord. She was the honoured example, by whose hands the Lord of the temple first illustrated his own doctrine. "If God so array the herbage, which today is in the field, and tomorrow is cast into the oven; will he not much more clothe you, O ye distrustful ?” Not more duly did the mother of Samuel make him his little tunic, from year to year, than this woman delighted to supply the needy, and to verify the words of her Lord: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and the righteousness required by him, and all these things shall be superadded to you." In her beloved Redeemer's service, poverty and pain, sickness and sorrow, were probably the very element in which she lived: a gloomy element it may be thought; but no, she who flung a radiance into all that obscurity, be sure was bright and blithesome herself. "Her ways are ways of pleasant

ness, and all her paths are peace."

But our thread of life is snapt, "as flax that is burnt with fire." She who had clothed herself with mercy as SEPTEMBER, 1847.

with a garment, for she had put on Christ (that was her goodly raiment) now lay, after the sepulchral ablutions, wrapt in a shroud. But it was not for long: her death was a public loss, for the poor had lost a friend; and when, all in such haste, Peter was sent for, it was apparently in expectation of more than ordinary consolation. What a touching picture! The holy and sympathising Apostle has arrived in that upper chamber: "and all the widows stood by him, weeping and shewing him the coats and cloaks which she had made while she was yet with them." Those woven monuments of her charity they still wore; and even now, her own works, no less than the widows' tears, followed her.

Her example, made conspicuous by the miracle of her resurrection, has indeed become a precious legacy to the whole church militant on earth: great has been its efficacy hitherto, nor have her honours ended yet; there are more to come-nay, have they as yet much more than begun? And all the daughters of Israel do still "flourish as a lily;" flowers of the church, stars of the world, and angels of the earth. Others shall arise, and call them also blessed. To abide with the Lord would have been far better for the saint of Saron, though that she should return and abide in the flesh was more needful for all those weeping widows, but they one and all shall partake either of a resurrection without a single regret, or of a no less happy transformation, at that glorious Epiphany which Paradise itself, and all heaven as well as earth, expects, when it shall be their blessed privilege to be for ever with the Lord. H. G.