4 6 
The Rose. 
“ The heart doth recognize thee, 
Alone, alone! the heart doth smell thee sweet, 
Doth view thee fair, doth judge thee most complete, 
Perceiving all those changes that disguise thee. 
Yes, and the heart doth owe thee 
More love, dead rose, than to any roses bold, 
Which Julia wears at dances, smiling cold ! 
Lie still upon this heart, which breaks below thee! ” 
Of all the poets that sing the praises of the roses, none seem 
to do so more con amove than Chaucer: his heroes and heroines 
are invariably garlanded with its flowers, as are his songs 
scented with its fragrance; and in the “ Romaunt of the Rose ” 
he dowers his favourite flowers with quite a poetical apotheosis. 
How well, too, does he describe Venus as wearing “ on her head 
her rosy garland, white and red.” Of roses white and red 
Shakspeare’s self does say: 
“ The roses fearfully on thorns did stand, 
One blushing shame, another white despair; 
A third, nor red nor white, had stolen of both.” 
St. Cecilia was said to have received a miraculous crown of 
roses from heaven ; and Tennyson tells how 
“ Her hair wound with white roses, slept St. Cecily.” 
To step from sacred to profane, how prettily has Bowring 
translated from the Russ of Rastrov, this evidence of the fiailty 
of lovers’ vows: 
“The rose is my favourite flower: 
On its tablets of crimson I swore 
That up to my last living hour 
I never would think of thee more. 
“I scarcely the record had made, 
Ere Zephyr, in frolicsome play, 
On his light airy pinions conveyed 
Both tablets and promise away. ’ 
Miss Kent, in “ Flora Domestica,” remarks that roses, when 
they are associated with a moral meaning, are generally identi¬ 
fied with mere pleasure ; but some writers, with a juster senti¬ 
ment, have made them emblems of the most refined virtue. 
In’the “ Orlando Innamorato,” Orlando puts roses in his 
helmet, which guard his ears against a Syren; and in Apuleius’ 
“ Golden Ass,” as already recorded, Lucius, who had been 
transformed into an ass, regains his human shape upon eating 
some of these flowers. 
The red rose, which, from its long residence amongst us, has 
