Poems by Felicia Dorothea Browne/On a Rose

by Felicia Hemans

ON A ROSE.

How short, sweet flower, have all thy beauties been,
An hour they bloom'd, and now no more are seen:
So human grandeur fades, so dies away;
Beauty and wealth remain but for a day.
But virtue lives for ever in the mind,
In her alone true happiness we find:
The perfume stays, altho' the rose be dead;
So virtue lives, when every grace is fled.