“One day Timur (fourteenth century) sent for Háfiz and asked angrily: ‘Art thou he who was so bold as to offer my two great cities Samarkand and Bokhara for the black mole on thy mistress’s cheek?’ alluding to a well-known verse in one of his odes. ‘Yes, sire,’ replied Háfiz, ‘and it is by such acts of generosity that I have brought myself to such a state of destitution that I have now to solicit your bounty.’ Timur was so pleased with the ready wit displayed in this answer that he dismissed the poet with a handsome present.”
To sum up: the reason why
“The rose that lives its little hour
Is prized beyond the sculptured flower”
is not, as Bryant implies, the transitoriness of the rose, but the fact that the marble flower, like the wax-flower, is dead and unchangeable, while the short-lived rose beams with the expression of happy vitality after a shower, or sadly droops and hangs its head in a drouth. It has life and expression, subtle gradations of colour, and light and shade, which are the signs of its vitality and moods, varying every day, every hour. And so with all the higher forms of life, those always being most beautiful and highly prized which are most capable of expressing subtle variations of health, happiness, and mental refinement.
There is no part of the human body which does not serve as a mark of expression—
“In many’s looks the false heart’s history
Is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange.”
“There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip,
Nay, her foot speaks.”—Shakspere.