A BOOK ABOUT ROSES 



the words which came to him from heaven, *The 

 wilderness shall blossom as a Rose.' In the Song 

 of Songs the Church compares herself unto 'the 

 Rose of Sharon ' ; and in the apocryphal scriptures 

 the son of Sirach likens wisdom to a Rose-plant 

 in Jericho, and holiness to a Rose growing by the 

 brook of the field. And the Rose still blooms on 

 that sacred soil, even in that garden of Gethsemane, 

 where He, who gives joy and life to all, was sorrowful 

 unto death.^ In our own, as in the older time, it 

 is associated with religion, with acts and thoughts 

 of holiness which should be fair and pure and 

 fragrant as itself ; and at the Orphanage of Beyrout, 

 the authoress of 'Cradle Lands' saw two hundred 

 and fifty maidens receive their first communion with 

 wreaths of white Roses on their heads.^ 



Passing from sacred to secular records, shall I 

 take down my Greek Lexicons, my Scott and 

 Liddell, Donnegan the fat and Hederic the slim, 

 my Dictionaries, Indices, and Gradus ad Parnassum.'^ 

 Shall I look out poSov and rosa, collect a few quota- 

 tions, dress up a few incidents, and then try to 

 convince my readers that I know every word which 

 classic authors have written anent the Rose ? Shall 



1 'The old man, a Franciscan monk, gave me a Rose as a 

 memorial of the garden.' — Bartlett's * Jerusalem Revisited,' p. 129. 



2 Syria, according to some writers, took its name from Suri, a 



