pale carnation, the blood-red damask, and a trailing- 

 rose, brought from France, that looks as though it 

 were live flame miraculously stilled. It is the hour 

 of the rose. Summer has gone, but the phantom- 

 summer is here still. A yellow butterfly hangs 

 upon a great drooping Marechal Niel : two white 

 butterflies faintly flutter above a corner-group of 

 honey-sweet roses of Provence. A late hermit-bee, 

 a few lingering wasps, and the sweet, reiterated, 

 insistent, late-autumn song of the redbreast. That 

 is all. It is the hour of the rose. . . . 



In the long history of th*e Rose, from the time 

 when the Babylonians carried sceptres ornamented 

 now with this flower, now with the apple or lotus, 

 to the coming of the Damask Rose into England in 

 the time of Henry VII. : from the straying into 

 English gardens, out of the Orient, of that lovely 

 yellow cabbage-rose, which first came into notice 

 shortly after Shakespeare's death, or from Shake- 

 speare's own "Proven9al rose," which is no other than 

 the loved and common cabbage-rose of our gardens : 

 from the combes of Devon to the straths of Suther- 

 land, to that little clustering rose which flowered in 

 Surrey meads in the days of Chaucer and has now 

 wandered so far north that the Icelander can gather 

 it in his brief hyperborean summer : from Keats' 

 musk-rose 



" The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, 

 The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves " 



to that Green Rose which for more than half a 

 century has puzzled the rose-lover and been a theme 



