GARDEN ROSES. 1 83 



by such abundant gains, and the tears of memory 

 must pass away as quickly as the dew in summer. 

 We ring out the old with funeral bells ; we ring in 

 the new with a merry peal. Pensive upon our 

 former favorites, and poring over ancient lists, wc 

 are as wanderers in some fair burial-ground, half 

 garden and half graves (would that ''God's acre" 

 were always so !), reading mournfully the names 

 of the departed. Let us rejoice the rather to leave 

 the shade of melancholy boughs for the sunlit 

 ground, which is garden all of it, and let us return 

 to the summer Roses, demanding and deserving 

 admission. 



The white and red Roses of my childhood 

 liave long left the garden in which they grew. I 

 see the former sometimes by old farmhouses and 

 in cottage plots, wildly vigorous as a gypsy's hair, 

 and covering huge bushes with its snowy flowers 

 profusely, like a Guelder Rose, recalling the sug- 

 gestion of the elder Pliny, that once upon a time 

 the land we live in was named, after its white 

 Roses, Albion — ob albas rosas. * But the latter, 

 the Damask, with its few rich velvety-crimson 

 petals, is a memory, and that is all. Nor do I ask 

 a restoration in either case ; only that they may be 



* " Albion insula sic dicta ab albis rupibus quas mare alluit, vel 

 ob rosas albas, quibus abuudat." — Hist. Nat., iv. 16. 



