“I remember,” continued the priest, “being severely censured by a rigid old priest, at my college in St. Omer’s, who found me reading the Idylium of Ausonius, in which he so beautifully celebrates the rose, when the good father believed me deep in St. Augustin.”
“The rose,” said I, “has always been the poet’s darling theme. The impassioned lyre of Sappho has breathed upon its leaves. Anacreon has wooed it in the happiest effusions of his genius; and poesy seems to have exhausted her powers in celebrating the charms of the most beautiful and transient of flowers.
“Among its modern panegyrists, few have been more happily successful than Monsieur de Barnard, in that charming little ode beginning:
“Tendre fruits des pleurs d’aurore,
Objets des baisers du zephyrs,
Reine de l’empire de Flore,
Hate toi d’epanoir.”
“O! I beseech you go on,” exclaimed Glor-vina; and at her request, I finished the poem.
“Beautiful, beautiful!” said she, with enthusiasm. “O! there is a certain delicacy of genius in elegant trifles of this description, which I think the French possess almost exclusively: it is a language formed almost by its very construction a’eterniser la bagatelle, and to clothe the fairy effusions of fancy in the most appropriate drapery.
“I thank you for this beautiful ode; the rose was always my idol flower; in all its different stages of existence, it speaks a language my heart understands; from its young bud’s first crimson glow, to the last sickly blush of its faded blossom. It is the flower of sentiment in all its sweet transitions; it breathes a moral, and seems to preserve an undecaying soul in that fragrant essence which still survives the bloom and symmetry of the fragile form which every beam too ardent, every gale too chill, injures and destroys.”