FUNERAL FLOWERS. 
M3 
With lore’s fond touch, my heart’s cry had been stilled 
Into a voiceless grief;—I would hare 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 we” 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 
Avith spices and other fragrant things. It was 
not unusual for a statue, called the Funeral 
Genius, to be placed in the grot^es, Avherein 
Avere deposited the ashes of the departed. To 
one of these our authoress has Avritten an 
address, from Avhich \\ r e quote :— 
“Flowers are upon thy brow, for so the dead 
W ere 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; 
