its obelisk with opening swell,
The bud unsheathed its crimson pinnacle;
Another, gathering every purpled fold,
Its foliage multiplied; its blooms unrolled,
The teeming chives shot forth; the petals spread;
The bow-pot's glory reared its smiling head;
While this, that ere the passing moment flew
Flamed forth one blaze of scarlet on the view,
Now shook from withering stalk the waste perfume,
Its verdure stript, and pale its faded bloom,
I marvelled at the spoiling flight of time,
That roses thus grew old in earliest prime.
E'en while I speak, the crimson leaves drop round,
And a red brightness veils the blushing ground.
These forms, these births, these changes, bloom, decay,
Appear and vanish in the self-same day.
The flower's brief grace, O Nature! moves my sighs,
Thy gifts, just shown, are ravished from our eyes.
One day the rose's age; and while it blows
In dawn of youth, it withers to its close.
The rose the glittering sun beheld at morn,
Spread to the light its blossoms newly born,
When in his round he looks from evening skies
Already droops in age, and fades, and dies.
Yet blest that, soon to fade, the numerous flower
Succeeds herself, and still prolongs her hour.
O virgins! roses cull, while yet ye may;
So bloom your hours, and so shall haste away.'

A Jewish legend declares that a famed cabalist was vainly pursued by
Death through many forms. But at last the grim enemy changed himself
into the perfume of a rose, which the magician--his suspicion lulled for
the instant--inhaled, and died. In many German cities--Hildesheim,
Bremen, and Luebeck among others--it is said that the death of a prebend
is heralded by the discovery of a white rose under his seat in the
cathedral. 'And,' as J. B. Friederich states (_Symbolik und Mythologie
der Natur_, p. 225), 'in the Tyrol the rose has a _deathly_ meaning,
since it is there believed that whoever wears an Alpine rose in his hat
during a thunderstorm will be struck by the lightning; for which reason
it is called the thunder-rose--a name probably derived from the
consecration of that flower to Donar, the god of thunder.'

The fantastic symbolism of the middle ages twined the Rose into
innumerable capricious forms, few of which, however, have any direct
derivation from _Nature_. Thus the Rose, from being typical of literal
love, became that of Christ; from symbolizing the light of Aurora, it
was made significant as