Fifty-One Tales by Lord Dunsany 1915

Roses

I know a roadside where the wild rose blooms with a strange

abundance.  There is a beauty in the blossoms too of an

almost exotic kind, a taint of deeper pink that shocks the

Puritan flowers.  Two hundred generations ago (generations,

I mean, of roses) this was a village street; there was a

floral decadence when they left their simple life and the

roses came from the wilderness to clamber round houses of

men.

   Of all the memories of that little village, of all the

cottages that stood there, of all the men and women whose

homes they were, nothing remains but a more beautiful blush

on the faces of the roses.

   I hope that when London is clean passed away and the

defeated fields come back again, like an exiled people

returning after a war, they may find some beautiful thing to

remind them of it all; because we have loved a little that

swart old city.