CHAPTER VII 

 ROSE-TIME 



"Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses." 



— George Herbert 



DOUGLAS JERROLD once described a land of plenty- 

 Australia it was, if memory serves — and he put his 

 comphment to that vast island's fertility into these 

 exuberant words: "Earth is here so kind, that just tickle her 

 with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest." 



Upon some such note of released vitaHty and expectant joy 

 one falls into step with the waning spring and opens the rose- 

 wreathed gate of June. Surely no word has greater content of 

 magic than "Rose-time." It has meant so much to you in 

 anticipation. It will now mean manyfold more in reahzation. 

 "In spring," as was said in an introductory paragraph, "one 

 can have the pleasure of building air-castles about the plants." 

 Quite; and it was a stimulating pastime, was it not? Those 

 gossamer, dewy structures of imagination you reared were put 

 together with thrills for mortar, weren't they? Indeed, there 

 are not a few people who find anticipation more precious than 

 reahzation. But we submit that those people never experienced 

 a rose-time all their ver\^ own. 



For, unquestionably delectable as building air-castles out of 

 rose-bushes is, roses, roses themselves, roses in riotous bloom 

 — ah well, we have also said that no true lover of roses rants. 

 But let us go on record here, that not only does rose-realization 

 transcend the most ecstatic anticipation, but that it erects a 

 concept of beauty and of fulness before which other hke grati- 

 fications of the senses pale and thin — and palL 



How shall one put this dehcate dehght into words? How 

 snare an emotion which is as elusive as an elfin wind? If you 

 pile on adjectives you crush the fragile pith; if you stake out 

 verbs the result is a chmisy stockade where only tender traceries 

 should festoon themselves. But, indeed, this is no novel diffi- 

 culty. For centuries poets and painters have struggled to 

 express themselves in roses, but with only faint success. Rose- 

 time, in brief, though without doubt one of the premier satis- 



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