As the warmest floral type of love, of light, of revelling, and of the glowing dawn, the Rose became naturally the symbol of Youth. Here again, some decided resemblance was, as usual, required, and it was found in the Blush, the most characteristic, as well as the most beautiful, indication of affinity in early life between the moral and physical nature. Youth is the rose-time of love, the June of its summer; its hours are those of the morning-star of life, and of its dawn; the lover is the bud, the bride the blushing flower expanding in perfume. Every resemblance in it refers to incipient life. The Bud is God, or Buddh', as the procreating deity, while the opening flower is the conceiving Aphrodite. All is early and transitory. The tendency of roses to quickly fade has given the poets of every land a most obvious simile for 'fleeting youth.'
'Go, lovely rose!
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be!
'Then die, that she
The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee—
How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and rare.'
In connection with youth, freshness, and blushes, the rose became, naturally enough, a type of reality and of natural truth. So in Hafiz:
'Can cheeks where living roses blow,
Where nature spreads her richest dyes,
Require the borrowed gloss of Art?'
The deepest and most solemn mystery which the Nature-love of the earliest times attached to every object, was that it reflected its very opposite, and must always be regarded as identified with it in a primitive origin, in which both existed undeveloped. So we have seen that the rose, while female as the expanding flower, was yet male as the contracted bud. As a symbol of joyousness, youth, light, beauty, and the blushing dawn, it was eminently the floral type of life—a simile which has been employed by the poets of every land, Spenser among others:
'The whiles some one did chant this lovely lay:
Ah see, who so fair thing dost fain to see,
In springing flower the image of thy day;
All see thy virgin ROSE, how sweetly she
Doth first peep forth with bashful modesty,
That fairer seems the less you see her may;
Lo! see soon after, how more bold and free
Her bared bosom she doth broad display;
Lo! see soon after, how she fades and falls away.
'So passeth, in the passing of a day
Of mortal life, the leaf, the bud, the flower,
Nor more doth flourish after first decay,
That erst was sought to deck both bed and bower
Of many a lady, many a paramour:
Gather the rose of love while yet in time,
Whilst loving thou may'st loved be with equal crime.'
But, as implying Life, the Rose also reflected Death, and this seemed to ray from the cruel thorns, which, as the German couplet says, remain after the leaves have vanished: