GRASS AND GREEN THINGS. 13 



around him he could have lived his fairy dreams ; and, like that prince 



of old, he might have — 



Loosly display'd uppon the grassie ground, 

 Possessed of sweete sleepe that luld him soft in swound.* 



We would live so, as did the ancient keepers of the sheep, with 

 grass upon our threshold and sunshine on our roof; and with Shen- 

 stone we would sing — 



If a friend my grass-grown threshold find, 

 O, how my lonely cot resounds with glee ! 



We might then lie- 



On the verdant grass, 



Beneath the covering trees, 



To cheat the hours with short repose, t 



Our life should have no harsh music, no discordant words, but, 

 like the pipe at a Lesbian vintage, breathe a song of pleasure. 



If it be well to live with the grass, then is it well to have it on 

 our graves. It will love to grow there with the golden flowers and 

 the creeping weeds of perfume, making holy the soft mound above us, 

 and beautifying the place of our fragrant rest. It takes something 

 from the sting of death, when the sufferer knows that he will sleep 

 beneath the grass, and the warm sunshine will lie all day upon his 

 grave, and the flowers keep watch when the stars shine. To rot in a 

 black charnel-house, and diffuse poison and pestilence in the cor- 

 rupted city, is a fearful fate for the body which has been the temple of 

 an immortal soul ; but to be pillowed where the grass waves green, 

 and the robin sings the song of summer, has something in it of 

 melancholy sweetness. It must have robbed the heart of poor 

 Ophelia of half her sorrow to know that her aged father had the grass 

 to cover his grave : — 



He is dead and gone, layde, he is dead and gone; 



At his head a grasse-greene tiurfe, at his heeles a stone. t 



* Faerie Queen, B. vi,, c. 7. 



+ Orlando Furioso (Hoole), B. xxiii., v. 39. 



J Hamlet, Folio ed., p. 273. 



