With every flower the earth has got,
What is it to the nightingale
If there his darling rose is not.
But romantic stories of the association of the queen of flowers with the prince of birds are many, and the reader may easily find more of them. In a legend told by the Persian poet Attarall the birds once appeared before King Solomon and complained that they could not sleep because of the nightly wailings of the bulbul, who excused himself on the plea that his love for the rose was the cause of irrepressible grief. This is the tradition to which Byron alludes in The Giaour:
The rose o’er crag or vale,
Sultana of the nightingale,
The maid for whom his melody,
His thousand songs, are heard on high,
Blooms blushing to her lover’s tale—
His queen, the garden queen, the rose,