FUNERAL FLOWERS. 



With love's fond touch, my heart's cry had been stilled 

 Into a voiceless grief; I would have strewed 

 With all the pale flowers of the vernal woods, 

 White violets, and the mournful hyacinth, 

 And frail anemone, thy marble brow, 

 In slumber beautiful ! I would have heaped 

 Sweet boughs and precious odours on thy pyre, 

 And with thine own shorn tresses hung thine urn, 

 And many a garland of the pallid rose 

 But thou liest far away ! No funeral chaunt, 

 Save the wild mourning of the wave, is thine ; 

 No pyre, save haply some long buried wreck; 

 Thou that wert fairest thou that wert most loved !" 



MRS. HEMANS. 



Reference is here made to the funeral pyre, 

 which it seems the Greeks were wont to deck 

 and garland with flowers, and render odorous 

 with spices and other fragrant things. It was 

 not unusual for a statue, called the Funeral 

 Genius, to be placed in the groves, wherein 

 were deposited the ashes of the departed. To 

 one of these our authoress has written an 

 address, from which we quote : 



"Flowers are upon thy brow, for so the dead 



Were crowned of old, with pale spring flow ers like these; 

 Sleep on, thine eye hath sunk, yet softly shed, 

 As from the wing of some faint southern breeze; 



