FUNERAL FLOWERS. 
“Flowers, wherefore do ye bloOm? 
- We.strew the pathway to the tomb!” 
J. Montgomery, 
“Here is the mother with her sons and daughters: 
The barren wife, the long demurring maid, 
Whose lonely unappropriated sweets __ 
Smiled like yon knot of cowslips on the cliff, 
Not to he come at by the willing hand: 
The sober widow, and the young green virgin. 
Cropped like a rose before ’tis fully blown 
Or half its worth disclosed.— Blair’s Grave. 
“ Pleasant,” says the Gaelic bard, u is the 
joy of grief! it is like the shower of spring, 
when it softens the branch of the oak, and the 
young leaf lifts its green head.” In the pe¬ 
rusal of many, indeed, we believe most, of the 
poems which follow, the real mourner may, 
without indulging a morbid spirit of repining, 
find comfort and consolation ; and for those yet 
unvisited by sorrow—the gay and the thought- 
