It is this delicious rose which Keats, when listening to the nightingale, sensed rather than visualized in the twilight dimness:
The coming musk-rose full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
The musk-rose was adored by the Elizabethans. Lord Bacon considered its scent to come next to that of the violet, and before all other flowers.
"You remember the great bush at the corner of the south wall just by the Blue Drawing-room window?" writes Mrs. Gaskell in "My Lady Ludlow." "That is the old musk-rose, Shakespeare's musk-rose, which is dying out through the kingdom now. The scent is unlike the scent of any other rose, or of any other flower."
The musk-rose is a native of North Africa, Spain, and India (Nepal). Hakluyt in 1582 gave the date of its introduction into England. "The turkey-cocks and hens," he says, "were brought in about fifty years past; the Artichoke in the time of Henry the Eighth; and of later times was procured out of Italy the Musk Rose plant and the Plum called Perdigwena."
Turning now to Parkinson and opening his big volume at the page "Rosa Moschata, simple and multiplex," we read:
"The Musk Rose, both single and double, rises up oftentimes to a very great height that it overgroweth any arbor in a Garden, or being set by a house side to be ten or twelve foot high, or more, but especially the single kind with many green far spread branches armed with a few sharp great thorns, as the wilder sorts of Roses are, whereof these are accounted to be kinds, having small dark green leaves on them, not much bigger than the leaves of Eglantines. The Flowers come forth at the tops of the branches, many together as it were in an umbel, or tuft, which, for the most part, do flower all at a time, or not long one after another, every one standing on a pretty long stalk and are of a pale whitish, or cream color, both the single and the double, the single being small flowers consisting of five leaves with many yellow threads in the middle; and the double bearing more double flowers, as if they were once or twice more double than the single, with yellow thrums also in the middle, both of them of a very sweet and pleasing smell, resembling musk. Some there be that have avouched that the chief scent of these Roses consisteth not in the leaves but in the threads of the Flowers."
The color of the musk-rose is white, slightly tinged with pink.
EGLANTINE; ALSO SWEETBRIER (Rosa eglanteria). This is a conspicuous adornment of Titania's bower, and is as remarkable for its beauty as for its scent. The pink flowers with their golden threads in the center are familiar to every one.
"The Sweet Briar, or Eglantine," Parkinson writes, "is not only planted in Gardens for the sweetness of its leaves, but growing wild in many woods and hedges, hath exceeding long green shoots armed with the cruellest sharp and strong thorns and thicker set than is in any Rose, either Wild or tame. The leaves are smaller than in most of those that are nourished up in Gardens, seven or nine, most usually set together on a rib, or stalk, very green and sweeter in smell about the leaves of any other kind of Rose. The flowers are small, single, blush Roses."