Leigh Hunt has a pleasant line about the rose:
And what a red mouth hath the rose, the woman of the flowers!
In the Malay language the same word signifies flowers and women.
Human beauty and the rose are ever suggesting images of each other to the imagination of the poets. Shakespeare has a beautiful description of the two little princes sleeping together in the Tower of London.
Their lips were four red roses on a stalk
That in their summer beauty kissed each other.
William Browne (our Devonshire Pastoral Poet) has a rosy description of a kiss:--
To her Amyntas
Came and saluted; never man before
More blest, nor like this kiss hath been another
But when two dangling cherries kist each other;
Nor ever beauties, like, met at such closes,
But in the kisses of two damask roses.
Here is something in the same spirit from Crashaw.
So have I seen
Two silken sister-flowers consult and lay
Their bashful cheeks together; newly they
Peeped from their buds, showed like the garden's eyes
Scarce waked, like was the crimson of their joys,
Like were the tears they wept, so like that one
Seemed but the other's kind reflection.
Loudon says that there is a rose called the York and Lancaster which when, it comes true has one half of the flower red and the other half white. It was named in commemoration of the two houses at the marriage of Henry VII. of Lancaster with Elizabeth of York.