int a new beauty upon them--not the pink that is a
diluted red, but the colouring of sunlight upon the lustre of a pearl.
The first reds were built upon the greens; this new pink was laid upon a
white base.

"The story is the same through all evolving things. Growth is a spiral.
We return to the same point but upon a higher level. Our ascent is
steadily upward--always over hills and valleys, so to speak, but our
valleys always higher above the level of the sea. So that the white is a
transition--an erasure of the old to prepare for the finer colouring.

"And now comes the blend of the maiden pink and the sunlight gold. The
greens and the reds are gone entirely. Mother Earth brings up the rose
with its virgin purity of tint, and the sun plays its gold upon it.
There are pink and yellow roses to show all the processes of this
particular scope of progress; some still too much pink, other roses have
fallen by the way into lemon and ochre and sienna; there are roses that
have reverted to the reds again; roses that have been caught in a sort
of fleshly lust and have piled on petals upon petals as the Holland
maidens pile on petticoats, losing themselves to form and texture and
colour, for the gross illusion of size. We see whole races of men lost
in the same illusion....

"There are roses that have accomplished all but perfection, save for a
few spots of red on the outer petals--like the persistent adhering
taint of ancient sins.... But you have seen the Clovellys--they are the
best we have found. They have made us deeper and wiser for their beauty.
Like some saintly lives--they seem to have come all but the last of the
ninety degrees between the green of the level water-courses and the
flashing gold of the meridian sun.... The Mother has borne them, and in
due time (as men must do, or revert to the ground again) they have
turned to the light of the Father.... The fragrance of these golden teas
is the sublimate of all Nature. Man, in the same way, is inclusive of
all beneath. He contains earth, air, water, fire and all their products.
In the tea-rose is embodied all the forces of plant-nature, since they
are the highest manifestation.... The June roses have lost the way in
their own spice; so many flowers are sunk in the stupors from their own
heavy sweetness. The mignonette has sacrificed all for perfume, and the
Old Mother has given her something not elsewhere to be found; the
nasturtium has progressed so purely as to hav