Rose-morals in English literature probably begin with
Sir John Mandeville in the fourteenth century. At any rate,
in the eighteenth chapter of his `Voyage and Travels' he professes
to tell us the origin of red and white roses. A fair maid had been
unjustly accused of wrong-doing and doomed to die by fire.
"And as the woode began to brenne (burn) about hir, she made hir prayer
to our Lorde as she was not gyltie of that thing, that he would helpe hir
that it might be knowne to all men. And whan (when) she had thus sayde,
she entered the fyre and anone the fyre went out, and those braunches
that were brenninge (burning) became red Roses and those braunches
that were not kindled became white Rosiers (rose bushes) full of white roses,
and those were the fyrst roses and rosyers that any man sawe,
and so was the mayden saved through the grace of God."
Thomas Carew has several rose-moralities, as `The True Beauty',
beginning "He that loves a rosy cheek," and his exquisite
`Red and White Roses':
"Read in these roses the sad story
Of my hard fate and your own glory:
In the white you may discover
The paleness of a fainting lover;
In the red, the flames still feeding
On my heart with fresh wounds bleeding.
The white will tell you how I languish,
And the red express my anguish:
The white my innocence displaying,
The red my martyrdom betraying.
The frowns that on your brow resided
Have those roses thus divided;
Oh! let your smiles but clear the weather,
And then they both shall grow together."*
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* See Saintsbury's `Elizabethan Literature' (Macmillan & Co., New York, 1887),
p. 363.
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Rollicking Robert Herrick, too, draws his morals, now advising the virgins
to make much of time, as in his `Gather ye rose-buds while ye may',
now preaching a rarely pathetic sermon, as in `To Blossoms':
"Fair pledges of a fruitful tree,
Why do ye fall so fast?
Your date is not so past,
But you may stay yet here awhile
To blush and gently smile,
And go at last.
"What, were ye born to be
An hour or half's delight,
And so to bid good-night?
'Twas pity Nature brought ye forth
Merely to show your worth,
And lose you quite.
"But you are lovely leaves, where we
May read how soon things have
Their end, though ne'er so brave:
And after they have shown their pride
Like you, awhile, they glide
Into the grave."*
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* `Palgrave', p. 89.
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Much like this last piece in import, and scarcely inferior to it in execution,
is `My life is like the summer rose' of Richard Henry Wilde,
which is familiar to every one.
Paul Hamilton Hayne's `The Red and the White Rose' (`Poems', pp. 231-232)
is an interesting dialogue, which the author concludes by making the former
an "earthly queen" and the latter a "heaven-bound votaress".
Mrs. Browning's `A Lay of the Early Rose' shows that we are not to strive
"for the dole of praise."