The Mossrose

Walking to-day in your garden, O gracious lady,         Little you thought as you turned in that alley remote and shady,         And gave me a rose and asked if I knew its savour--         The old-world scent of the mossrose, flower of a bygone favour--         Little you thought as you waited the word of appraisement,         Laughing at first and then amazed at my amazement,         That the rose you gave was a gift already cherished,         And the garden whence you plucked it a garden long perished.         But I--I saw that garden, with its one treasure         The tiny mossrose, tiny even by childhood's measure,         And the long morning shadow of the dusty laurel,         And a boy and a girl beneath it, flushed with a childish quarrel.         She wept for her one little bud: but he, outreaching         The hand of brotherly right, would take it for all her beseeching:         And she flung her arms about him, and gave like a sister,         And laughed at her own tears, and wept again when he kissed her.         So the rose is mine long since, and whenever I find it         And drink again the sharp sweet scent of the moss behind it,         I remember the tears of a child, and her love and her laughter,         And the morning shadows of youth and the night that fell thereafter.