Therefore it is that I feel all roses to have some secret power
about them; even their names may mean something in connexion
with themselves, in which they differ from nearly all the sons of men.
But the rose itself is royal and dangerous; long as it has remained
in the rich house of civilization, it has never laid off its armour.
A rose always looks like a mediaeval gentleman of Italy, with a cloak
of crimson and a sword: for the thorn is the sword of the rose.
And there is this real moral in the matter; that we have
to remember that civilization as it goes on ought not perhaps
to grow more fighting--but ought to grow more ready to fight.
The more valuable and reposeful is the order we have to guard, the more
vivid should be our ultimate sense of vigilance and potential violence.
And when I walk round a summer garden, I can understand how those high mad
lords at the end of the Middle Ages, just before their swords clashed,
caught at roses for their instinctive emblems of empire and rivalry.
For to me any such garden is full of the wars of the roses.
The Gold of Glastonbury
One silver morning I walked into a small grey town of stone, like twenty
other grey western towns, which happened to be called Glastonbury;
and saw the magic thorn of near two thousand years growing in the open
air as casually as any bush in my garden.
In Glastonbury, as in all noble and humane things, the myth is more
important than the history.
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