and not an ancient sentiment. Even, it is Rosa 

 said, the allusions of the Latin poets are not Mystica. 

 those of lovers and enthusiasts. It is the 

 Rose of Catullus, we are reminded, that 

 blooms in the old Italic literature, the flower 

 of festival, of Venus and Bacchus, alluded to 

 more for its associations and its decorative 

 value than for love borne to it or enthusiasm 

 lit by it as by a fragrant flame. 



All this may be so, and yet I am not 

 persuaded that the people of ancient days did 

 not love this flower of flowers as truly as, if 

 perhaps differently than, we do. It is true 

 that the ancients do not appear to have 

 regarded nature, either in the abstract or in 

 the particular, in the way characteristic of 

 peoples of modern times and above all of our 

 own time. But literary allusiveness does not 

 reveal the extent or the measure of the love of 

 objects and places. It is almost inconceivable, 

 for example, that so beauty-loving a people as 

 the Greeks did not delight in the rose. The 

 fact that only a mere handful of roses may be 

 culled from all the poetry of Hellas, here a 

 spray from Sappho, a wine-flusht cluster from 

 Anacreon, a dew-wet bloom from Theocritus, 

 a few wild -roses from the Anthology, an 

 epithet from Homer, an image from Simonides 

 or Pindar, a metaphor in some golden mouth, 



34i 



