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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, being mentioned in the classic writers,
and no doubt were the spontaneous tributes
of unlettered affection, originating long

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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.

There is also a most delicate and beautiful
rite observed in some of the remote villages of
the south, at the funeral of a female who has
died young and unmarried. A chaplet of white
flowers is borne before the corpse by a young
girl nearest in age, size, and resemblance, and
is afterwards hung up in the church over the

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accustomed seat of the deceased. These chaplets
are sometimes made of white paper, in
imitation of flowers, and inside of them is generally
a pair of white gloves. They are intended
as emblems of the purity of the deceased,
and the crown of glory which she has
received in heaven.

In some parts of the country, also, the dead
are carried to the grave with the singing of
psalms and hymns: a kind of triumph, “to
show,” says Bourne, “that they have finished
their course with joy, and are become conquerors.”
This, I am informed, is observed in some of
the northern counties, particularly in Northumberland,
and it has a pleasing, though melancholy
effect, to hear, of a still evening, in some
lonely country scene, the mournful melody of
a funeral dirge swelling from a distance, and
to see the train slowly moving along the landscape.
There is also a solemn respect paid by
the traveller to the passing funeral in these sequestered
places, for such spectacles, occurring
among the quiet abodes of nature, sink deep

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into the soul. As the mourning train approaches,
he pauses, uncovered, to let it go
by; he then follows silently in the rear; sometimes
quite to the grave, at other times for a
few hundred yards, and having paid this tribute
of respect to the deceased, turns and resumes
his journey.

The rich vein of melancholy which runs
through the English character, and gives it
some of its most touching and ennobling graces,
is finely evidenced in these pathetic customs,
and in the solicitude shown by the common
people for an honoured and a peaceful grave.
The humblest peasant, whatever may be his
lowly lot while living, is anxious that some
little respect may be paid to his remains. Sir
Thomas Overbury, describing the “faire and
happy milkmaid,” observes, “thus lives she,
and all her care is, that she may die in the
spring time, to have store of flowers stucke
upon her winding sheet.” The poets, too, who
always breathe the feeling of a nation, continually
advert to this fond solicitude about the

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grave. In “The Maid's Tragedy,” by Beaumont
and Fletcher, there is a beautiful instance
of the kind, describing the capricious melancholy
of a broken-hearted girl:


When she sees a bank
Stuck full of flowers, she, with a sigh, will tell
Her servants, what a pretty place it were
To bury lovers in; and make her maids
Pluck 'em, and strew her over like a corse.

The custom of decorating graves was once
universally prevalent: osiers were carefully
bent over them to keep the turf uninjured,
and evergreens and flowers were planted about
them. This has now become extremely rare,
but it may occasionally be met with in the
church yards of the little retired villages
among the Welsh mountains; and I recollect
an instance of it in the small town of Ruthen,
that lies at the head of the beautiful vale of
Clewyd.

There was a melancholy fancy in the arrangement
of these rustic offerings that had
something in it exquisitely poetical. The

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nature and colour of the flowers, and of the ribbands
with which they were tied, were emblematical
of the qualities or story of the deceased,
or the feelings of the mourner. In an
old poem, entitled “Corydon's Doleful Knell,”
a lover specifies the decorations he intends to
use:


A garland shall be framed
By art and nature's skill,
Of sundry-coloured flowers,
In token of good will.
And sundry-coloured ribbands
On it I will bestow;
But chiefly blacke and yellowe
With her to grave shall go.
I'll deck her tomb with flowers
The rarest ever seen;
And with my tears as showers
I'll keepe them fresh and green.

The white rose, we are told, was planted at
the grave of a virgin; her chaplet was tied
with white ribbands, in token of her spotless
innocence, though sometimes black ribbands
were intermingled, to bespeak the grief of the
survivors. The red rose was occasionally used
in remembrance of such as had been

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remarkable for benevolence; but roses in general were
appropriated to the graves of lovers. Those
who had been unhappy in their loves had emblems
of a more gloomy character, such as the
yew, the cypress, and flowers of melancholy
colour. Thus, in poems by Thomas Stanley,
Esq. (published in 1651) is the following
stanza:


Yet strew
Upon my dismall grave
Such offerings as you have,
Forsaken cypresse and sad ewe;
For kinder flowers can take no birth
Or growth from such unhappy earth.

In “The Maid's Tragedy,” also, is introduced
a pathetic little air, illustrative of the mode
of decorating the funerals of females who had
been disappointed in love:

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The natural effect of sorrow over the dead
is to refine and elevate the mind, and we have
a proof of it in the purity of sentiment that
pervades the whole of these funereal observances,
though confined to the inferior classes of
society. Thus, it was an especial precaution,
that none but sweet-scented evergreens and
flowers should be used on these occasions.
The object seems to have been to soften the
horrors of the tomb, to beguile the mind from
brooding over the disgraces of perishing mortality,
and to associate the memory of the deceased
with what is most delicate and beautiful
in nature. There is a dismal process going on
in the grave, ere dust can return to its kindred
dust, which the imagination shrinks from contemplating;
and we seek still to think of the
form we have loved, with the associations of
refinement which it awakened when blooming
before us in youth and beauty. “Lay her
i'the earth,” says Laertes of his virgin sister,

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I might crowd my pages with extracts from
the older British poets, who wrote when these
rites were more prevalent, and delighted frequently
to allude to them; but I have already
quoted more than is necessary; and yet I cannot
refrain from giving a passage from Shakspeare,
even though it should appear trite, which
illustrates the emblematical meaning often conveyed
in these floral tributes, and which possesses
that magic of language and appositeness
of imagery for which he stands pre-eminent:


With fairest flowers,
Whilst summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele,
I'll sweeten thy sad grave; thou shalt not lack
The flower that's like thy face, pale primrose; nor
The azur'd harebell like thy veins; no, nor
The leaf of eglantine; whom not to slander,
Outsweetened not thy breath.

There is certainly something more affecting
in these prompt and spontaneous offerings of
nature, than in the most costly monuments of
art; the hand strews the flower while the heart
is warm, and the tear falls on the grave as affection
is binding the osier around the sod; but

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pathos expires under the slow labour of the
chisel, and is chilled among the cold conceits
of sculptured marble.

It is greatly to be regretted, that a custom
so truly elegant and touching should have disappeared
from general use, and exist only in
the most remote and insignificant villages. But
it seems as if poetical custom always shuns the
walks of cultivated society. In proportion as
people grow polite they cease to be poetical.
They talk of poetry, but they have learnt to
check its free impulses, to distrust its sallying
emotions, and to supply its most affecting and
picturesque usages, by studied form and pompous
ceremonial. Few pageants can be more
stately and frigid than an English funeral in
town. It is made up of show and gloomy parade:
mourning carriages, mourning horses,
mourning plumes, and hireling mourners, who
make a mockery of grief. “There is a grave
digged,” says Jeremy Taylor, “and a solemn
mourning, and a great talk in the neighbourhood,
and when the daies are finished, they

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shall be, and they shall be remembered no
more.” The associate in the gay and crowded
city is soon forgotten; the hurrying succession
of new intimates and new pleasures efface him
from our minds, and the very scenes and circles
in which he moved are incessantly fluctuating.
But funerals in the country are always
more impressive. The stroke of death makes
a wider space in the village circle, and is an
awful event in the tranquil uniformity of rural
life. The death bell tolls its knell in every ear;
it steals with its pervading melancholy over
every hill and vale, and saddens all the landscape.

The fixed and unchanging features of the
country also, perpetuate the memory of the
friend with whom we once enjoyed them, who
was the companion of our most retired walks,
and gave animation to every lonely scene. His
idea is associated with every charm of nature;
we hear his voice in the echo which he once
delighted to awaken; his spirit haunts every

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grove which he once frequented; we think of
him in the wild upland solitude, or amidst the
pensive beauty of the valley. In the freshness
of joyous morning, we remember his beaming
smiles and bounding gayety; and when sober
evening returns with its gathering shadows and
subduing quiet, we call to mind many a twilight
hour of gentle talk and sweet-souled melancholy.

Another cause that perpetuates the memory
of the deceased in the country, is, that the
grave is more immediately in sight of the survivors.
They pass it on their way to prayer;
it meets their eyes when their hearts are softened
by the exercises of devotion; they linger about
it on the sabbath, when the mind is disengaged
from worldly cares, and most disposed to turn
aside from present pleasures and present loves,

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and to sit down among the solemn mementos
of the past. In North Wales the peasantry
kneel and pray over the graves of their deceased
friends for several Sundays after the interment;
and where the tender rite of strewing and planting
flowers is still practised, it is always renewed
on Easter, Whitsuntide, and other festivals,
when the season brings the companion of former
festivity more vividly to mind. It is also invariably
performed by the nearest relatives and
friends; no menials nor hirelings are employed,
and if a neighbour yields assistance, it would be
deemed an insult to offer compensation.

I have dwelt upon this beautiful rural custom,
because, as it is one of the last, so it is one
of the holiest offices of love. The grave is the
ordeal of truly human affection. It is there
that the divine passion of the soul shows its superiority
to the instinctive attachment of the
brute; for the love of the animal must be continually
refreshed by the presence of its object,
but the love of the human soul can live on long
remembrance!

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The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow
from which we refuse to be divorced. Every
other wound we seek to heal—every other affliction
to forget; but this wound we consider it
a duty to keep open—this affliction we cherish
and brood over in solitude. Where is the mother
that would willingly forget the infant that
perished like a blossom from her arms, though
every recollection is a pang? Where is the
child that would willingly forget the most tender
of parents, though to remember be but to
lament? Who, even in the hour of agony,
would forget the friend over whom he mourns?
Who, even when the tomb is closing upon the
remains of her he most loved, and he feels his
heart, as it were, crushed in the closing of its
portal, would accept consolation that was to be
bought by forgetfulness?—No, the love which
survives the tomb is one of the noblest attributes
of the soul. If it has its woes, it has likewise
its delights; and when the overwhelming
burst of grief is calmed into the gentle tear of
recollection; when the sudden anguish and the

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convulsive agony over the present ruins of all
that we most loved, is softened away into pensive
meditation on all that it was in the days of
its loveliness—who would root out such a sorrow
from the heart? Though it may sometimes
throw a passing cloud even over the bright
hour of gayety; or spread a deeper sadness
over the hour of gloom; yet who would exchange
it even for the song of pleasure, or the
burst of revelry? No, there is a voice from the
tomb sweeter than song. There is a recollection
of the dead to which we turn even from
the charms of the living. Oh the grave!—the
grave!—It buries every error—covers every defect—
extinguishes every resentment. From its
peaceful bosom spring none but fond regrets
and tender recollections. Who can look down
upon the grave even of an enemy, and not feel
a compunctious throb, that ever he should have
warred with the poor handful of earth that lies
mouldering before him!

But the grave of those we loved—what a

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place for meditation! Then it is that we call
up in long review the whole history of virtue
and gentleness, and the thousand endearments
lavished upon us almost unheeded in the daily
intercourse of intimacy;—then it is that we
dwell upon the tenderness, the solemn, awful
tenderness of the parting scene—the bed of
death, with all its stifled griefs, its noiseless
attendance, its mute, watchful assiduities—the
last testimonies of expiring love—the feeble,
fluttering, thrilling, oh! how thrilling! pressure
of the hand—the last fond look of the glazing
eye, turning upon us even from the threshold
of existence—the faint, faltering accents struggling
in death to give one more assurance of
affection!

Aye, go to the grave of buried love, and
meditate! There settle the account with thy
conscience for every past benefit unrequited—
every past endearment unregarded, of that departed
being, who can never—never—never
return to be soothed by thy contrition!

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If thou art a child, and hast ever added a
sorrow to the soul, or a furrow to the silvered
brow of an affectionate parent—if thou art a
husband, and hast ever caused the fond bosom
that ventured its whole happiness in thy arms,
to doubt one moment of thy kindness or thy
truth—if thou art a friend, and hast ever
wronged, in thought, or word, or deed, the
spirit that generously confided in thee—if thou
art a lover, and hast ever given one unmerited
pang to that true heart that now lies cold and
still beneath thy feet;—then be sure that every
unkind look, every ungracious word, every ungentle
action, will come thronging back upon
thy memory, and knocking dolefully at thy
soul—then be sure that thou wilt lie down
sorrowing and repentant on the grave, and
utter the unheard groan, and pour the unavailing
tear, more deep, more bitter, because unheard
and unavailing.

Then weave thy chaplet of flowers, and
strew the beauties of nature about the grave;

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console thy broken spirit, if thou canst, with
these tender, yet futile tributes of regret;—but
take warning by the bitterness of this thy contrite
affliction over the dead, and be more faithful
and affectionate in the discharge of thy duties
to the living.

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