THE IVY. 



valuable is the last in the list ; for, once rooted, it may be allowed to run, and 

 wherever it runs it will carry a cheerful face, and give its glossy sober leafage in 

 exchange for blank earth suggestive of noisome barrenness. It must be repeated 

 that it is one of the best of graveyard plants, and most appropriate for a clothing 

 of the mounds which mark the resting-places of the dead. If the reader will call 

 to mind how, in our burial-places, about nine-tenths of the graves are left for rank 

 grasses and sow-thistles and docks to compete for the mastery, the suggestion of 

 a cheap and appropriate garniture, needing but little care, and in itself an emblem 

 of the consoling thought that our religion offers in compensation for the loss of 

 those "we love, "will appear otherwise than superfluous or unseemly. The Laureate 

 found satisfaction in reflecting that from the heart of his friend might spring u the 

 violet of his native land"; others may be gratified by seeing the sacred dust 

 of those who were dear to them in life decently covered with "the garland of 

 eternity." When Jenny Lind heard of the death of her friend, the late Bishop 

 of Norwich, she sent, according to the custom of her country, a chaplet of ivy to 

 be placed on his grave, as " her tears." It was an elegant and appropriate tribute 

 of affection. The Greeks and Romans rarely planted ivy on graves, for they held 

 it in reverence chiefly as the associative of festivity ; but Saturn and Bacchus are 

 no more, the great god Pan has no " humble psean," and, except in name as a 

 badge for botanists, Cybele herself has finished her symbolical career. 



In decorative art the ivy has never enjoyed the importance it appears entitled 

 to by its singularly beautiful outlines, its diversity of characters, its natural 

 association with the stems of trees, that indicate its appropriateness for the 

 embellishment of architectural columns, and, though last not least, its renown as 

 an emblem of unchangeableness and duration. The vine, palm, acanthus, honey- 

 suckle, oak, rose, water-lily, pomegranate, and trefoil, have, so it appears to the 

 writer, been far more freely and tastefully employed, some of them in ancient, and 

 all of them in modern times, than this most accommodating of all vegetables, both 

 for realistic and conventional designs. There cannot be a doubt that it is adapted 

 to furnish an almost exhaustless variety of elegant forms for the purposes of the 

 sculptor, the worker in metals, and the designer of the humbler kinds of domestic 

 ornaments. We may look for ivies on friezes, mouldings, bosses, and fonts ; and 

 for suggestions of their forms in mullions and capitals : but rarely shall we find 

 them. The Greeks evidently thought they had done enough for the plant by 

 assigning it to Bacchus, but in the somewhat stern but always beautiful realism 

 of the early English Gothic, it occurs frequently in decorative details, and most 

 appropriately accompanies the material expression of the Christian idea of our 



