MID-SUMMER.

The hills are sweet with the brier-rose.— Whittier.

Sweet is the rose, but grows upon a brier.— Edmund Spencer.

As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again.— Keats.

What mortal knows Whence comes the tint and odor of the rose.— Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

The rose saith in the dewy morn,
I am most fair;
Yet all my loveliness is born
Upon a thorn.— Christina G. Rossetti.
The roses grew so thickly, I never saw the thorn,
Nor deemed the stem was prickly until my hand was torn.— Peter Spencer.
Gather ye rosebuds while you may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.— Herrick.
If this fair rose offend thy sight,
Placed in thy bosom bare,
'Twill blush to find itself less white,
And turn Lancastrian there.— Unknown.
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where ox-lips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.— Shakespeare.
The rose is fairest when 'tis budding new,
And hope is brightest when it dawns from fears;
The rose is sweetest washed with morning dew,
And love is loveliest when embalmed in tears.— Scott.
My life is like the summer rose
That opens to the morning sky,
But ere the shades of evening close,
Is scattered on the ground—to die!
Yet on the rose's humble bed
The sweetest dews of night are shed.— Richard Henry Wilde.