Churchyard.
RURAL FUNERALS.
Here's a few flowers! but about midnight more:
The herbs that have oil them cold dew o' the night
Are strewings fitt'st for graves----
You were as flowers now withered; even so
These herblets shall, which we upon you strow.
CYMBELINE.
AMONG the beautiful and simple-hearted customs of rural life
which still linger in some parts of England are those of strewing
flowers before the funerals and planting them at the graves of
departed friends. These, it is said, are the remains of some of
the rites of the primitive Church; but they are of still higher
antiquity, having been observed among the Greeks and Romans, and
frequently mentioned by their writers, and were no doubt the
spontaneous tributes of unlettered affection, originating long
before art had tasked itself to modulate sorrow into song or
story it on the monument. They are now only to be met with in the
most distant and retired places of the kingdom, where fashion
and innovation have not been able to throng in and trample out
all the curious and interesting traces of the olden time.
In Glamorganshire, we are told, the bed whereon the corpse lies
is covered with flowers, a custom alluded to in one of the wild
and plaintive ditties of Ophelia:
White his shroud as the mountain snow,
Larded all with sweet flowers;
Which be-wept to the grave did go,
With true love showers.
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