Beautiful Rose

Beautiful Rose:

Off on the prairie, where the balmy air

Kisses the waving corn,

There lives a farmer, with a daughter fair--

Fair as a summer's morn!

She has a nature gentle as a dove,

Pure as the mountain snows;

Say! is it strange that everyone should love--

Love such a girl as Rose?

Beautiful Rose! lovely Rose!

Pride of the prairie bower!

Everybody loves her--everybody knows

She is the fairest flower.

Rose is a lady yet from early dawn,

Labors her skillful hand;

She is the housewife, now her mother's gone--

Gone to the better land.

Rose has the beauty--father has the gold--

Both will be hers one day;

For she is young, while he is growing old--

Old people pass away.

Clerks from the city, plowmen from the field,

Lords from a foreign land;

Each in their turn have very humbly kneeled--

Kneeled for her heart and hand.

But to them all she made the same reply--

Kindly but firmly, "No!"

And none but I can tell the reason why--

Why she should treat them so.

-by Henry Clay Work