142 FUNERAL FLOWERS. 
It was not in their sports oniy, that the 
Greeks were so lavish of flowers; they crowned 
their dead with them, and the mourners wore 
them, in their funeral ceremonies. That they 
also planted them on the graves of the departed, 
or at least, deemed it pleasant and fitting that 
they should be there, we may learn from this 
passage of one of their great dramatists. In the 
Agamemnon,” the chorus, lamenting over 
Alcestis, says:— 
“ Oh, lightly on thy hallowed grave 
Lie the green turf, the flow’ret wave.”—.ffiscHYLUs. 
Indeed, flowers seem to have been to this taste¬ 
ful people, a sort of poetic language, whereby 
they expressed the intensity of feelings to which 
they found common language inadequate. 
A modern poetess, who has caught, and finely 
transfused into our language, the spirit of an¬ 
tique song, thus makes a Grecian mother lament 
the loss of her son, supposed to have perished 
at sea :— 
• 
“Where art thou—where?—Had I hut lingering prest 
On thy cold lips the last, long kiss,—but smoothed 
The parted ringlets of thy shining hair 
