I was just walking down a busy sidewalk, and there it was. It was undamaged. Either it had only just been accidentally dropped, or people had been taking care to walk around it.
Sentimental me, I was instantly reminded of the lovely Irish song referenced above in the title. Except, my first encounter with it was through a German translation of the lyrics in the opera Martha by Friedrich von Flotow.
Let me explain. When I was a child my father's LP collection included a recording of selections from the opera, with Anneliese Rothenberger and Fritz Wunderlich in the starring roles. I fell in love with it the very first time I listened to it, but I didn't know that this particular song was actually an already-existing song that had been borrowed into the opera with translated German lyrics (as "Letzte Rose") -- I simply assumed it was just part of the opera, composed by Flotow and cleverly presented as an Irish song as sung by "Martha", the peasant character assumed by Lady Harriet (Queen Anne's lady-in-waiting, who was herself so high-born that she had her own staff of ladies-in-waiting to wait on her!) for a lark, not realizing that she was about to break farmer Lionel's heart, who had taken her act at face value. Only much later did I come to realize that there was actually a beautiful original Irish version of the song.
But still, I'll always remember the first line as "Letzte Rose, wie magst du so einsam hier bluehn?", because that's how I memorized it first...
Here is the relevant cut from the original recording (there have been subsequent recordings with different leads):
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