Rosa and widespread aversion to throwing a rose 

 Mystica. m t a g raV e, or even letting one fall or be 

 lowered there. ('It is throwing red life away ' 

 it was explained to me once, — with the grim 

 addition, 'and Death will at once be hungry 

 for more of the rose-thrower.') 



Again, I recall an old legend of the last rose 

 of summer, long anterior to the familiar song 

 so named : a legend of how at Samhain (Hallow- 

 mass) 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 invocation, 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 un- 

 changing 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 



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