Diogenes of London (collection)/'The Rose of the Morning'

O-DAY the Spring is in my heart—the Spring and its roses. The fumes of the morning have mounted into my senses; the blood runs in little gushes of delight through my body. Yet with all this intoxication I am sober enough to think upon the courses of the sun and to see the world with the eyes of wisdom. This is the time of roses. It is true enough that the flowers no longer have their seasons; but each still makes an ample exhibition at its own particular point of the year. Our artificers of the garden have stolen from us the individual enchantment of the months; these no longer enjoy their divine rights, but slip by now without distinctive gait, with no private gaieties of their own, an equable procession of good-natured visitors lacking their proper spites and ecstasies. It was the flowers that marked the time of the year; and now from January to December our clock is broken, and we must set our lives by the stars. Once my love had lived through twenty summers of the rose, and now she must take her age from the sun. We may pick our roses now in the snows of Christmas as appropriately and as casually as upon May-Day. This despotic abolition of our calendar would have been welcome had it kept the sun in the heaven, and left us unchanged our vicissitudes in the garden; but we cannot live our time out under frames, and as yet we lack the secret of the rains. And to rob these periods of their emblems is, as it were, to rob a house of its scutcheon, a woman of her honour; certainly to rob the year of its history. We have plundered the returning moons of their birthrights, and it is now only by the profusion of its offerings that a season protests against the monstrous violation of its natural law.

In June, it may be, is the grand climacteric of the rose; then she blows and swells into her maturer proportions, her fuller fragrance. But our summers live hard in these days, and, do we get that solstice at all, we are by mid-year steeped in its favours and asweat with its gifts; and the rose is overblown. May, if she come in her own apparel, is a fresher, fairer time, as is this May of mine. Her flowers have bourgeoned, but they have still the dew of the morning upon them, they still disperse the odour of the Springtime. This truly is the proper dawn of the year, and wears the face of youth, even in this old and veteran city. To-day I have put by the prodigious achievements of human art, and am living in the supreme hour of the rose. The town is ablaze with roses; the very streets and houses breathe them to my nostrils. For I have risen with the whimsey in my head, and all Nature is one blushing rose. The air is scented with the summer rain; the squares are joyous. There comes my mistress with a red rose at her bosom this merry morning. Drops sparkle between the petals; she wears the first white garment of the year; everywhere is a rose—a rose. It laughs in her eyes, which are blue as the violet; it blooms in her cheeks, which are pink as a daisy; on my faith, it is in her lily-white brow, it tosses with her brown hair. Her lips—when were not lips a rose to a lover? The shops are a masque of roses, but her rose is the rose for me. Upon their stems the flowers hang sedately, reticent within their leaves, modest apparitions of grace; but, plucked and shining on her breast, they are endued with a new courage, informed with a fresh pertinence, and inspired with the zeal of their comely dwelling-place. She herself is their exemplar, and to adorn her is to wither with honour. But as my love trips towards me there is no thought of death this dewy morning. Her soul creeps up the sky to the meridian, and in the light and warmth of her being the roses bud and blow in her possession. To-day the morning rings with gaiety. If you would see Aurora newly lighted upon the earth with her sweet dimples, here is the vision at your doors, ye modern men of London! There are no softer smiles than hers, there is no shyer ecstasy. Each step makes music in her ears; each glance espies battalions of delight; with each breath she has thrills of the world and its mystery. No thought interrupts the sprightly march of her sensations; life throbs in her body; and the rose is dancing over her heart to the beat of her gaieties.

On this rosy morning the flowers are vivid on their bunches. They wake and stir together, one might say; they, too, have the spirit of youth. And this rose on the bosom of my mistress, afire with its pride of place, grows garrulous and jocund, and lives at the heat and pace of fever. See now, as she nears me, how it calls in its exhilaration to the roses in her face! In and out they blow and fade, trepidant and precipitate; here with a quiver, gone with a shake, in fitful and bewildered answer to the summons from below. 'Fuller and ever fuller'—the crimson swells and shrinks, flames and falters. Like a flaw upon the sea a stain of red starts up and spreads over her cheek; at her white bosom is that patch incarnadine—the red, red rose. Agitant and tremulous it has burst open, and its pure heart lies bare. It has lived its life through this merry May morning, but the dew and the fragrance still linger in its petals, as the happy tears on the eyelids of my beloved now she lies in my arms, with her roses.