Rosa gardens, out of the Orient, of that lovely 

 Mystica. yellow cabbage-rose which first came into 

 notice shortly after Shakespeare's death, or 

 from Shakespeare's own 'Provencal rose,' 

 which is no other than the loved and common 

 cabbage-rose of our gardens : from the combes 

 of Devon to the straths of Sutherland, 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 Keat's 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 of many speculations ... a thousand 

 wise and beautiful things have been said of 

 this most loved of flowers and not a few errors 

 been perpetuated. 



What has become of the Blue Roses to 

 which in 1800 a French writer, Guillemeau, 

 alludes as growing wild near Turin ? They 

 are no less phantoms than some of the rose- 

 allusions which the poet has made sacrosanct, 

 that to the Rhetorician have become an 

 accepted convention. Again, we are told and 

 retold that the cult of the rose is a modern 



340 



