Heres a few ?owers! but about midnight more:
The herbs that have oil them cold dew o the night
Are strewings ?ttst fraves----
You were as ?owers now withered; even so
These herblets shall, which we upon you strow.
CYMBELINE.
AMONG the beautiful and simple-hearted s of rural life which still linger in some parts of England are those of strewing ?owers before the funerals and planting them at the graves of departed friends. These, it is said, are the remains of some of the rites of the primitive Church; but they are of still higher antiquity, having been observed among the Greeks and Romans, and frequently mentioned by their writers, and were no doubt the spontaneous tributes of uered affe, inating long before art had tasked itself to modulate sorrow into song or story it on the mo. They are now only to be met with in the most distant aired places of the kingdom, where fashion and innovation have not been able t in and trample out all the curious and iing traces of the olden time.
In Glamanshire, we are told, the bed whereon the corpse lies is covered with ?owers, a alluded to in one of the wild and plaities of Ophelia:
White his shroud as the mountain snow,
Larded all with sweet ?owers;
Which be-wept to the grave did go,
With true love showers.
There is also a most delicate aiful rite observed in some of the remote villages of the south at the funeral of a female who has died young and unmarried. A chaplet of white ?owers is borne before the corpse by a young girl in age, size, and resemblance, and is afterwards hung up in the church over the aced seat of the deceased. These chaplets are sometimes made of white paper, in imitation of ?owers, and inside of them is generally a pair of white gloves. They are intended as emblems of the purity of the deceased, and the of glory which she has received in heaven.
In some parts of the try, also, the dead are carried to the grave with the singing of psalms and hymns--a kind of triumph, "to show," says Bourhat they have ?heir course with joy, and are bee querors." This, I am informed, is observed in some of the northern ties, particularly in Northumberland, and it has a pleasing, though melancholy effect to hear of a still evening in some lonely try se the mournful melody of a funeral dirge swelling from a distance, and to see the train slowly moving along the landscape.
Thus, thus, and thus, we pass round
Thy harmless and unhaunted ground,
And as we sing thy dirge, we will,
The daffodill
And other ?owers lay upon
The altar of our love, thy stone.
HERRICK.
There is also a solemn respect paid by the traveller to the passing funeral in these sequestered places; for such spectacles, among the quiet abodes of Nature, sink deep into the soul. As the m train approaches he pauses, uncovered, to let it go by; he then follows silently in the rear; sometimes quite to the grave, at other times for a few hundred yards, and, having paid this tribute of respect to the deceased, turns and resumes his journey.
The rich vein of melancholy which runs through the English character, and gives it some of its most toug and ennobling graces, is ?nely evidenced in these pathetic s, and in the solicitude shown by the on people for an honored and a peaceful grave. The humblest peasant, whatever may be his lowly lot while living, is anxious that some little respect may be paid to his r