e
May read in thee--
How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and rare.'

In connection with youth, freshness, and blushes, the rose became,
naturally enough, a type of reality and of natural truth. So in Hafiz:

'Can cheeks where living roses blow,
Where nature spreads her richest dyes,
Require the borrowed gloss of Art?'

The deepest and most solemn mystery which the Nature-love of the
earliest times attached to every object, was that it reflected its very
opposite, and must always be regarded as identified with it in a
primitive origin, in which both existed undeveloped. So we have seen
that the rose, while female as the _expanding_ flower, was yet male as
the _contracted_ bud. As a symbol of joyousness, youth, light, beauty,
and the blushing dawn, it was eminently the floral type of _life_--a
simile which has been employed by the poets of every land, Spenser among
others:

'The whiles some one did chant this lovely lay:
Ah see, who so fair thing dost fain to see,
In springing flower the image of thy day;
All see thy virgin ROSE, how sweetly she
Doth first peep forth with bashful modesty,
That fairer seems the less you see her may;
Lo! see soon after, how more bold and free
Her bared bosom she doth broad display;
Lo! see soon after, how she fades and falls away.

'So passeth, in the passing of a day
Of mortal life, the leaf, the bud, the flower,
Nor more doth flourish after first decay,
That erst was sought to deck both bed and bower
Of many a lady, many a paramour:
Gather the rose of love while yet in time,
Whilst loving thou may'st loved be with equal crime.'

But, as implying Life, the Rose also reflected Death, and this seemed to
ray from the cruel thorns, which, as the German couplet says, remain
after the leaves have vanished:

'The rose falls away,
But the thorns ever stay.'

And a far older Hindu proverb solemnly exclaims: 'Hast thou obtained thy
wish; exult not: canst thou not see how the thorn pierces the finger at
the same instant when the rose is gathered?'

Birth and Death, as typified in the Rose, and their mutual production,
are beautifully expressed by Ausonius in the remainder of the poem
already cited:

'I saw a moment's interval divide
The rose that blossomed from the rose that died.
_This_ with its cap of tufted moss looked green;
_That_, tipped with reddening purple, peeped between;
One reared