The Poetry Corner

For A Present Of Roses

By Robert Fuller Murray

Crimson and cream and white-- My room is a garden of roses! Centre and left and right, Three several splendid posies. As the sender is, they are sweet, These lovely gifts of your sending, With the stifling summer heat Their delicate fragrance blending. What more can my heart desire? Has it lost the power to be grateful? Is it only a burnt-out fire, Whose ashes are dull and hateful? Yet still to itself it doth say, 'I should have loved far better To have found, coming in to-day, The merest scrap of a letter.'