There is a legend in Sir John Mandeville's Travels, which in our spelling runs thus: "Bethlehem is a little city, long and narrow and well walled, and on each side enclosed with good ditches. It was wont to be called Ephrata.... And toward the east end of the city is a full fair church and a gracious, and it hath many towers, pinnacles, and corners, full strong, and curiously made; and within that church be forty-four pillars of marble, massive and fair.
"And between the city and the church is the field Floridus, that is to say, the 'Field of Flowers'; it being so named for this reason: A fair maiden was blamed with wrong and slandered ... for which cause she was demned to death and to be burnt in that place, to the which she was led. And, as the fire began to crackle about her, she made her prayers to our Lord,—that, as assuredly as she was not guilty of that sin, He would help her and make it to be known to all men, of His merciful grace. And when she had thus said, she entered into the fire, and anon was the fire quenched and out; and the brands that were burning became red rose-trees, and the brands that were not kindled became white rose-trees, full of roses. And these were the first rose-trees and roses, both white and red, that ever any man saw; and thus was this maiden saved by the grace of God. And therefore is that field clept the field of God, Floridus, for it is full of roses."
[163]. "These Flowers, as in their causes, sleep." (line 4)
—while, also, flowers may themselves be the causes of poems, as, in a degree, a dewdrop in a buttercup is of the buttercup's causing. There the rhodora, or rhododendron:
In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals, fallen in the pool,
Made the black water with their beauty gay;