can be seen, and even smelt, in Greek, Latin,
Provencal, Gothic, Renascence, and Puritan poems. Beyond this mere word
Rose, which (like wine and other noble words) is the same in all the
tongues of white men, I know literally nothing. I have heard the more
evident and advertised names. I know there is a flower which calls
itself the Glory of Dijon--which I had supposed to be its cathedral. In
any case, to have produced a rose and a cathedral is to have produced
not only two very glorious and humane things, but also (as I maintain)
two very soldierly and defiant things. I also know there is a rose
called Marechal Niel--note once more the military ring.

And when I was walking round my garden the other day I spoke to my
gardener (an enterprise of no little valour) and asked him the name of
a strange dark rose that had somehow oddly taken my fancy. It was almost
as if it reminded me of some turbid element in history and the soul. Its
red was not only swarthy, but smoky; there was something congested and
wrathful about its colour. It was at once theatrical and sulky. The
gardener told me it was called Victor Hugo.

Therefore it is that I feel all roses to have some secret power about
them; even their names may mean something in connexion with themselves,
in which they differ from nearly all the sons of men. But the rose
itself is royal and dangerous; long as it has remained in the rich house
of civilization, it has never laid off its armour. A rose always looks
like a mediaeval gentleman of Italy, with a cloak of crimson and a
sword: for the thorn is the sword of the rose.

And there is this real moral in the matter; that we have to remember
that civilization as it goes on ought not perhaps to grow more
fighting--but ought to grow more ready to fight. The more valuable and
reposeful is the order we have to guard, the more vivid should be our
ultimate sense of vigilance and potential violence. And when I walk
round a summer garden, I can understand how those high mad lords at
the end of the Middle Ages, just before their swords clashed, caught at
roses for their instinctive emblems of empire and rivalry. For to me any
such garden is full of the wars of the roses.

The Gold of Glastonbury

One silver morning I walked into a small grey town of stone, like twenty
other grey western towns, which happened to be called Glastonbury; and
saw the magic thorn of near two thousand years growing in the open air
as casually as