OUR QUEEN OF BEAUTY. 3/ 



which to tell mankind of their exodus from the Law to the 

 Gospel, slavery to freedom, fear to love — these were the 

 words which came to him from heaven, " The wilderness 

 shall blossom as a Rose." In the Song of Songs the 

 Church compares herself unto "the Rose of Sharon ;" and 

 in the apocryphal scriptures the son of Sirach likens wisdom 

 to a Rose-plant in Jericho, and holiness to a Rose growing 

 by the brook of the field. And the Rose still blooms on 

 that sacred soil, even in that garden of Gethsemane, where 

 He, who gives joy and life to all, was sorrowful unto 

 death.* In our own, as in the older time, it is associated 

 with religion, with acts and thoughts of holiness which 

 should be fair and pure and fragrant as itself; and at the 

 Orphanage of Bey rout, the authoress of d'adle Lands saw 

 two hundred and fifty maidens receive their first com- 

 munion with wreaths of white Roses on their heads."[* 



Passing from sacred to secular records, shall I take down 

 my Greek Lexicons, Donnegan the fat and Hederic the 

 slim, my Dictionaries, Indices, and Gradus ad Parnassum } 

 Shall I look out fo^oi/ and rosa^ collect a few quotations, 



* " The old man, a Franciscan monk, gave me a Rose as a memorial of the 

 garden." — Bartlett's Jenisalem Rrjisited, p. 129. 



+ Syria, according to some writers, took its name from Suri, a species of 

 Rose indigenous to it. 



