The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon
was the verger, who came to inform me that it was time to close the
library. I sought to have a parting word with the quarto, but the worthy
little tome was silent; the clasps were closed: and it looked perfectly
unconscious of all that had passed. I have been to the library two
or three times since, and have endeavored to draw it into further
conversation, but in vain; and whether all this rambling colloquy
actually took place, or whether it was another of those old day-dreams
to which I am subject, I have never, to this moment, been able to
discover.
* Thorow earth and waters deepe,
The pen by skill doth passe:
And featly nyps the worldes abuse,
And shoes us in a glasse,
The vertu and the vice
Of every wight alyve;
The honey comb that bee doth make
Is not so sweet in hyve,
As are the golden leves
That drops from poet’s head!
Which doth surmount our common talke
As farre as dross doth lead.
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.
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 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.
Thus, thus, and thus, we compass round
Thy harmless and unhaunted ground,
And as we sing thy dirge, we will,
The daffodill
And other flowers lay upon
The altar of our love, thy stone.
HERRICK.
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 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 honored 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 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 made her maids
Bluck ‘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 about
them were planted evergreens and flowers. “We adorn their graves,” says
Evelyn, in his Sylva, “with flowers and redolent plants, just emblems
of the life of man, which has been compared in Holy Scriptures to those
fading beauties whose roots, being buried in dishonor, rise, again in
glory.” This usage has now become extremely rare in England; but it
may still be met with in the churchyards of retired villages, among the
Welsh mountains; and I recollect an instance of it at the small town of
Ruthven, which lies at the head of the beautiful vale of Clewyd. I have
been told also by a friend, who was present at the funeral of a young
girl in Glamorganshire, that the female attendants had their aprons full
of flowers, which, as soon as the body was interred, they stuck about
the grave.
He noticed several graves which had been decorated in the same manner.
As the flowers had been merely stuck in the ground, and not planted,
they had soon withered, and might be seen in various states of decay;
some drooping, others quite perished. They were afterwards to be
supplanted by holly, rosemary, and other evergreens, which on some
graves had grown to great luxuriance, and overshadowed the tombstones.
There was formerly a melancholy fancifulness in the arrangement of these
rustic offerings, that had something in it truly poetical. The rose
was sometimes blended with the lily, to form a general emblem of frail
mortality. “This sweet flower,” said Evelyn, “borne on a branch set with
thorns and accompanied with the lily, are natural hieroglyphics of our
fugitive, umbratile, anxious, and transitory life, which, making so
fair a show for a time, is not yet without its thorns and crosses.” The
nature and color of the flowers, and of the ribbons with which they were
tied, had often a particular reference to the qualities or story of the
deceased, or were expressive of 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-colored flowers,
In token of good-will.
And sundry-colored ribbons
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 keep them fresh and green.
The white rose, we are told, was planted at the grave of a virgin; her
chaplet was tied with white ribbons, in token of her spotless innocence,
though sometimes black ribbons were intermingled, to bespeak the grief
of the survivors. The red rose was occasionally used, in remembrance of
such as had been remarkable for benevolence; but roses in general were
appropriated to the graves of lovers. Evelyn tells us that the custom
was not altogether extinct in his time, near his dwelling in the county
of Surrey, “where the maidens yearly planted and decked the graves
of their defunct sweethearts with rose-bushes.” And Camden likewise
remarks, in his Britannia: “Here is also a certain custom, observed time
out of mind, of planting rose-trees upon the graves, especially by the
young men and maids who have lost their loves; so that this churchyard
is now full of them.”
When the deceased had been unhappy in their loves, emblems of a more
gloomy character were used, such as the yew and cypress, and if flowers
were strewn, they were of the most melancholy colors. 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 yewe;
For kinder flowers can take no birth
Or growth from such unhappy earth.
In The Maid’s Tragedy, a pathetic little air, is introduced,
illustrative of this mode of decorating the funerals of females who had
been disappointed in love:
Lay a garland on my hearse
Of the dismall yew,
Maidens, willow branches wear,
Say I died true.
My love was false, but I was firm,
From my hour of birth;
Upon my buried body lie
Lightly, gentle earth.
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 and the
unaffected elegance of thought which pervaded the whole of these
funeral observances. Thus it was an especial precaution that none but
sweet-scented evergreens and flowers should be employed. The intention
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 the most delicate and
beautiful objects 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 those refined associations which it awakened when
blooming before us in youth and beauty. “Lay her i’ the earth,” says
Laertes, of his virgin sister,
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring.
Herrick, also, in his “Dirge of Jephtha,” pours forth a fragrant flow
of poetical thought and image, which in a manner embalms the dead in the
recollections of the living.
Sleep in thy peace, thy bed of spice,
And make this place all Paradise:
May sweets grow here! and smoke from hence
Fat frankincense.
Let balme and cassia send their scent
From out thy maiden monument.
* * * * *
May all shie maids at wonted hours
Come forth to strew thy tombe with flowers!
May virgins, when they come to mourn
Male incense burn
Upon thine altar! then return
And leave thee sleeping in thy urn.
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. I