FUNERAL CUSTOMS OF THE WORLD. 811 



many and so full of interest that one knows not where or when to 

 stop. There is the burial at sea the most solemn of all when 

 upon the mighty ocean the little group gathers round the captain, 

 and he commits the body to the waters until that day when " the 

 sea shall give up her dead." There are the rare forms of funeral 

 ceremonies ; for, although the chief are those I have mentioned 

 earth-burial, burning, and embalming yet these are not all. 

 Some races merely expose the body without any protection, as 

 some others actually put to death the aged and infirm. Strangest 

 of all, the Parsees of India expose their dead to the fowls of the 

 air on the Towers of Silence at Bombay, holding that earth, or 

 air, or water may not be desecrated by contact with the lifeless 

 body. 



There are the great funerals of the world : of Alaric the Goth, 

 the conqueror of Rome, who was inclosed in a golden coffin and 

 buried in the bed of a river, which had been turned aside for the 

 purpose and then turned back, those who knew the spot being put 

 to death. Of Alexander the Great, from Babylon to Egypt, the 

 grandest funeral the world has ever seen. Of Napoleon, the 

 modern Alexander, when 



" Cold and brilliant streamed the sunlight 

 On the wintry banks of Seine ; 

 Gloriously the imperial city 

 Eeared its pride of tower and fane ; 

 Solemnly with deep voice sounded, 

 Notre Dame, thine ancient chime, 

 And the minute-guns re-echoed 

 In the same deep, measured time ; 

 "While, above the cadenced cortege, 

 Like a dream of glory flits, 

 Tattered flag of Jena, Friedland, Areola, and Austerlitz." 



Of the good Queen Eleanor, wife of Edward the Confessor, that 

 wife " whom living he had loved, and dead he had never ceased 

 to love," and whose body the great king followed on foot from end 

 to end of England, setting at each stopping place a cross, until 

 he came to Charing Cross, in the very heart of London to-day, 

 whence the body was borne to its final rest in England's mighty 

 abbey. Of Israel's great leader on 



" Nebo's rocky mountain height, on this side Jordan's wave, 

 Where, in the land of Moab, there lies a lonely grave ; 

 And no man knows that sepulchre, and no man saw it e'er. 

 For the angel of God upturned the sod, and laid the dead man there." 



Of Him who was laid in the rock-hewn tomb of Calvary, "the 

 man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." Time does not per- 

 mit us to dwell upon these, or upon the literature of the tomb 

 Longfellow's God's Acre, Gray's Elegy, Milton's Lycidas, and 



