Stock.... Lasting Beauty.
The Stock has been made the emblem of lasting beauty; because, though it is less graceful than the rose, and less majestic than the lily, its splendour is more durable, and its fragrance of longer continuance. Few flowering plants have been so much and so rapidly improved by cultivation as the Stock. Within the last two centuries, its nature has been almost entirely changed by the florist; and it is now a shrub whose branches are covered with blossoms little inferior in dimensions to the rose. Stocks are produced of various colours, but the bright red or carmine must ever remain the favourite variety. The principal branches of this fragrant family are the Ten-week Stock, so named from flowering about ten weeks after it is sown; and the Brompton, which does not bloom till about twelve months after sowing, and was first cultivated in the neighbourhood of Brompton, England.
Without the smile from partial beauty won,
Oh, what were man!—a world without a sun!
Campbell.
Beauty has gone; but yet her mind is still
As beautiful as ever; still the play
Of light around her lips has every charm
Of childhood in its freshness.
The lily may die on thy cheek,
With freshness no longer adorning;
The rose that envelopes its whiteness may seek
To take back her mantle of morning;
Yet still will Love’s tenderness beam from thine eye,
And ask for that homage no heart can deny.
Dawes.
The glory of the human form
Is but a perishing thing, and Love will droop
When its brief grace hath faded. But the mind
Perisheth not, and when the outward charm
Hath had its brief existence, it awakes,
And is the lovelier that it slept so long.