FLORAL ANTIQUITIES OF THE EAST. 133 



their embrace ; strangely do they fall off, sere and withered, from the 

 stony faces of the temples and idols of the past ; and more strangely 

 still a fresh group spring up there to hide the ghastly ruins from the 

 sun, and to throw over the white bones and powdered granite a warm 

 hue of life, making the two ends of the world meet as they do often 

 on the cheek of beauty, — life, fresh and beautiful above ; death, with 

 his stony eye, lurking underneath. 



And yet those fallen altars, those crumbling monuments, those 

 lands dyed with the blood of the brave, and sprinkled with fragments 

 as with flakes of snow, stiU hide under their coverings of flowers the 

 records of many generations of men, with whose lives such flowers as 

 those were twined, and of whose acts and thoughts and impulses, those 

 very flowers can repeat the history. 



It was one of the redeeming traits of the old mythologies, that 

 floral ornaments, sacrifices of herbs, and allegorical combinations of 

 fruits and flowers were regarded as aids to worship, or as symbols of 

 the divine idea, or even as mediators between humanity kneeling in 

 the dust, and the Supreme Being, throned upon a million worlds. 

 India, with its memorials of blood and tyranny and fanaticism, looks 

 even less fearful when its rites are seen to be surrounded with these 

 mute poetic forms. The mighty Bhyroe, the Assura or evil spirit, 

 gains something in the midst of his enormities, when his granite idol 

 is seen adorned with flowers, * the offerings of the kneeling children 

 of Brahma. The sacrifice of fire to all the gods, the thiid of the five 

 great Hindoo sacrifices, with its impressive solemnity becomes still 

 more solemn when the pi'iest, after many prayers and holy services, 

 places the vessel containing the sacred fire on the spot consecrated to 

 it ; and then sprinkles around it the green blades of the cusa grass, f 

 and sitting on the ground pronounces the name of the earth ijiaudibly. 

 Then after reciting a sacred mantra, more blades of cusa are placed 

 around the fire, the sacred butter is poured upon the flame, and he 

 sits down with his face towards the east, and meditates on Brahma, 

 the Lord of the Creation. X The grass is the key to the symbol, and 

 while hinting that man is still close to nature, upholds the mystery 



* Jablouski, Egyptian Pantheon. 

 + Poa Cynosuroides. 



X Colebrooke on the Religion of the Hindoos. — Asiatic Researches, Vol. vii, 

 No. 8. 



