54 THE BOUQUET. 



And ancient ladies, quaintly slight, 

 In its pink iDlossoms took delight, 

 And on the steps would make a stand. 

 To scent its sweetness, fan in hand. 



Long have been dead those ladies gay ; 

 Their very heirs have passed away ; 

 And their old portraits, prim and tall, 

 Are mouldering in the mouldering hall; 

 The terrace and the balustrade 

 Lie broken, weedy and decayed. 



But, lithe and tall, the Rose of May 

 Shoots upward through the niin gray, 

 With scented flower, and leaf pale green, 

 Such Rose as it hath ever been ; 

 Left like a noble deed, to grace 

 The memory of an ancient race. 



What exact species of Rose this is I do not know ; it appears not 

 to be approved of in modern gardens; at least, if it be, it is so much 

 altered by cultivation as to have lost much of its primitive character. 

 I saw it in three different situations in Nottinghamshire. In the 

 small remains of gardens and old labyrinthine shrubbery at Aw- 

 thorpe Hall, — which, when we were there, had just been taken 

 down, — the residence of the good Col. John Hutchinson, and his 

 STv^eet wife Lucy ; — ^in the very gardens which, as she relates in his 

 life, he laid out, and took so much pleasure in. It was growing, 

 also, with tall shoots and abundance of flowers, in the most forlorn 

 of gardens, at an old place called Burton Grange, a house so deso- 

 late and deserted as to have gained, from a poetical friend of ours, 

 the appropriate name of the Dead House. It was a dreary and 

 most lonesome place ; the very bricks of which it was built were 



