Sensitive Plant.... Chastity.
This singular plant is so named from its motions imitating the sensibility of animal life. It contracts itself in the evening and expands with the morning light, and shrinks from external violence, folding up its leaves at the mere approach of one’s hand. The Violet is the emblem of that retiring modesty which proceeds from reflection, but the Sensitive Plant is a perfect image of innocence and virgin modesty, the result of instinct.
So dear to heaven is saintly chastity,
That when a soul is found sincerely so,
A thousand liveried angels lackey her,
Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt.
Oh! she is colder than the mountain’s snow.
To such a subtile purity she’s wrought,
She’s prayed and fasted to a walking thought:
She’s an enchanted feast, most fair to sight,
And starves the appetite she does invite;
Flies from the touch of sense, and if you dare
To name but love she vanishes to air.
Crown.
In thy fair brow there’s such a legend writ
Of chastity, as blinds the adulterous eye:
Not the mountain ice,
Congealed to crystals, is so frosty chaste
As thy victorious soul, which conquers man,
And man’s proud tyrant-passion.
Dryden.
Like the Mimosa shrinking from
The blight of some familiar finger—
Like flowers which but in secret bloom,
Where aye the sheltered shadows linger,
And which beneath the hot noon-ray
Would fold their leaves and fade away—
The flowers of Love in secret cherished,
In loneliness and silence nourished,
Shrink backward from the searching eye,
Until the stem whereon they flourished,
Their shrine, the human heart, has perished,
Although themselves may never die.