THE SYMBOL OF THE ROSE 103 



of many speculations ... a thousand wise and 

 beautiful things have been said of this most loved 

 of flowers, and not a few errors been perpetu- 

 ated. . . . 



I recall an old legend of the last rose of summer, 

 long anterior to the familiar song so named : a 

 legend of hoAv at Samhain (Hallowmass) when of 

 old was held the festival of summer ended and of 

 winter begun, a young Druid brought a rose to the 

 sunward stones, and, after consecration and invoca- 

 tion, threw it into the sea. 



To-day, sitting in my old garden amid many 

 roses, and looking westward across a waveless, a 

 moveless sea, now of faint apple-green and fainter 

 mauve lost in a vast luminous space of milky, violet- 

 shadowed translucency, I dream again that old 

 dream, and wonder what its portent then, what 

 its ancient significance, of what the symbol now, 

 the eternal and unchanging symbol. For nothing 

 is more strange than the life of natural symbols. 

 We may discern in them a new illusion, a new 

 meaning : the thought we slip into them may be 

 shaped to a new desire and coloured with some new 

 fantasy of dreams or of the unspoken and nameless 

 longing in the heart : but the symbol has seen a 

 multitude of desires come and go like shadows, has 

 been troubled with many longings and baffled wings 

 of the veiled passions of the soul, and has known 

 dreams, many dreams, dreams as the uncounted 

 sand, the myriad wave, the illimitable host of 

 cloud, rain that none hath numbered. The Symbol 

 of the Lily has been the chalice of the world's 



