THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN 

 POETRY 



SOME five years ago there appeared a little volume, named 

 'Ros Rosarum ex Horto Poetarum,' and bearing upon its 

 title-page the well-known initials of E. V. B., under which 

 the Hon. Mrs. Richard Cavendish Boyle has given several 

 works of combined literary and artistic merit to the world. 

 This volume is an anthology culled from the poetry of all 

 languages and ages upon the theme of the rose. To make 

 such a collection at once complete would have been 

 almost impossible ; and a book not quite complete, like Mrs. 

 Boyle's ' Ros Rosarum,' has the advantage of suggestiveness 

 and stimulation to the fancy of the reader, which an exhaustive 

 anthology of rose-literature would have failed to convey. 



Studying its pages with close attention, I observed that 

 Mrs. Boyle had omitted two important passages in Latin 

 poetry which may be regarded as the twin fountain-heads of 

 a large amount of verses written upon roses in the modern 

 world. On turning to Catullus and Ausonius and comparing 

 the passages in question with some stanzas by Poliziano, 

 Ariosto, Tasso, Guarini, Spenser, Herrick, Waller, Ronsard, 

 and other modern poets, I was so much struck with the 

 examples of literary derivation they afforded, that I composed 

 the following essay, which I now present as an attempt to 

 study the forms of hybridism in poetry. 



The first of the two passages in question occurs in the 

 second Epithalamium of Catullus : 



Ut flos in saeptis secretus nascitur hortis, 

 Ignotus pecori, nullo contusus aratro, 



