Byron expressed a wish that all woman-kind had but one rosy mouth, that he might kiss all woman-kind at once.  This, as some one has rightly observed, is better than Caligula’s wish that all mankind had but one head that he might cut it off at a single blow.

Leigh Hunt has a pleasant line about the rose: 

    And what a red mouth hath the rose, the woman of the flowers!

In the Malay language the same word signifies flowers and women.

Human beauty and the rose are ever suggesting images of each other to the imagination of the poets.  Shakespeare has a beautiful description of the two little princes sleeping together in the Tower of London.

    Their lips were four red roses on a stalk
    That in their summer beauty kissed each other.

William Browne (our Devonshire Pastoral Poet) has a rosy description of a kiss:—­

            To her Amyntas

Came and saluted; never man before
More blest, nor like this kiss hath been another
But when two dangling cherries kist each other;
Nor ever beauties, like, met at such closes,
But in the kisses of two damask roses.

Here is something in the same spirit from Crashaw.

                            So have I seen
    Two silken sister-flowers consult and lay
    Their bashful cheeks together; newly they
    Peeped from their buds, showed like the garden’s eyes
    Scarce waked, like was the crimson of their joys,
    Like were the tears they wept, so like that one
    Seemed but the other’s kind reflection.

Loudon says that there is a rose called the York and Lancaster which when, it comes true has one half of the flower red and the other half white.  It was named in commemoration of the two houses at the marriage of Henry VII. of Lancaster with Elizabeth of York.

Anacreon devotes one of his longest and best odes to the laudation of the Rose.  Such innumerable translations have been made of it that it is now too well known for quotation in this place.  Thomas Moore in his version of the ode gives in a foot-note the following translation of a fragment of the Lesbian poetess.

    If Jove would give the leafy bowers
    A queen for all their world of flowers
    The Rose would be the choice of Jove,
    And blush the queen of every grove
    Sweetest child of weeping morning,
    Gem the vest of earth adorning,
    Eye of gardens, light of lawns,
    Nursling of soft summer dawns
    June’s own earliest sigh it breathes,
    Beauty’s brow with lustre wreathes,
    And to young Zephyr’s warm caresses
    Spreads abroad its verdant tresses,
    Till blushing with the wanton’s play
    Its cheeks wear e’en a redder ray.

From the idea of excellence attached to this Queen of Flowers arose, as Thomas Moore observes, the pretty proverbial expression used by Aristophanes—­you have spoken roses, a phrase adds the English poet, somewhat similar to the dire des fleurettes of the French.