I was once a flower--fair and large. My snowy chalice, filled with
a perfume so rich as to intoxicate the rainbow-winged insects that
perched upon it, recalled to those who beheld me the beauty of those
myrrhine cups used at the banquets of the old Cæsars.
The bees sang to me all through the bright summer; the winds caressed
me in the hours of sultriness; the Spirit of the Dew filled my white
cup by night. Great plants, with leaves broader than the ears of
elephants, overshadowed me as with a canopy of living emerald.
Far off I heard the river singing its mystic and everlasting hymn and
the songs of a thousand birds. By night I peeped up through my satiny
petals at the infinite procession of the stars; and by day I turned
forever to the eye of the sun my heart of yellow gold.
Hummingbirds with jeweled breasts, flying from the Rising of the Sun,
nestled near me and drank the perfumed dews left lingering in my
chalice, and sang to me of the wonders of unknown lands--of black roses
that grew only in the gardens of magicians and spectral lilies whose
perfume is death which open their hearts only to tropical moons.
They severed the emerald thread of my life, and placed me in her hair.
I did not feel the slow agony of death, like the fettered fireflies
that glimmered as stars in the night-darkness of those splendid
tresses. I felt the perfume of my life mingling in her blood and
entering the secret chambers of her heart; and I mourned that I was but
a flower.
That night we passed away together. I know not how she died. I had
hoped to share her eternal sleep; but a weird wind entering through the
casement rent my dead leaves asunder and scattered them in white ruin
upon the pillow. Yet my ghost like a faint perfume still haunted the
silent chamber and hovered about the flames of the waxen tapers.
Other flowers, not of my race, are blooming above her place of rest.
It is her blood that lives in the rosiness of their petals; her breath
that lends perfume to their leaves; her life that vitalizes their veins
of diaphanous green. But in the wizard hours of the night, the merciful
Spirit of the Dew, who mourns the death of summer day, bears me aloft
and permits me to mingle with the crystal tears which fall upon her
grave.