Bring flowers, fresh flowers, for the bride to wear! Bring flowers for the locks of the fair young bride! For this, through its leaves, hath the white rose burst; Though they smile in vain for what once was ours, Bring flowers to the shrine where we kneel in prayer, Let us now take a picture of a marriage ceremony at Corinth, in the old times of her glory and luxury: The day of espousals was over, And on the crowning day, A gay procession take again Through thronging streets, their way. Before them by the Paranymphs, The coronals are borne, Composed of all sweet flowers of spring With lighted tapers in array They enter the holy door, And the priest with the waving thuribule Then in the ever-blessed name, Almighty, over all, From the man's paranymph he took The marriage coronal. And crowning him therewith, in that Next, with like action, and like words, Upon her brow he set Her coronal; entwined wherein, The rose and lily met; How beautifully they beseemed Her locks of glossy jet!" In a note to the above the author quotes from DR. KING'S Rites: "Formerly these crowns were garlands made of flowers or shrubs; but now there are generally in all churches, crowns of silver or other metals, kept for that purpose." He furthes states, that BISHOP HEBER, Writing from the Carnatic, alludes to "a certain crown of flowers, used in marriages." THE BRIDAL AND THE BURIAL, BY JAMES MONTGOMERY. Blessed is the bride whom the sun shines on; I saw thee young and beautiful, In the first blush of womanhood, The church bells rang, And the little children sang "Flowers, flowers, kiss her feet; The winter is past, the rains are gone; I saw thee poor and desolate, In broken-hearted widowhood, And the little children sang, "Lilies dress her winding sheet; Sweets to the sweet! The summer's past, the sunshine's gone; Blessed is the corpse which the rain rains on." 203 CHAPTER VII. FUNERAL FLOWERS. "FLOWERS, wherefore do ye bloom! We strew the pathway to the tomb!" J. MONTGOMERY. "Here is the mother with her sons and daughters: Or half its worth disclosed.-BLAIR'S GRAVE. In treating of "Floral Ceremonies," we have purposely avoided any allusion to those hallowed rites, with which people of all ages and countries, have delighted to honour the memory of departed worth and beauty; this is a subject, or rather a branch of a subject, which demands a chapter to itself. We can promise our readers that it will comprise passages and extracts as rich in poetic beauty, as any of the preceding chapters, and we trust that it will not prove the less acceptable, or pleasing, from the melancholy tenor of those extracts; and of the observations which we may find it necessary to make on them. 66 'Pleasant," says the Gaelic bard, "is the joy of grief! it is like the shower of spring, when it softens the branch of the oak, and the young leaf lifts its green head." In the perusal of many, indeed, we believe most, of the poems which follow, the real mourner may, without indulging a morbid spirit of repining, find comfort and consolation; and for those yet unvisited by sorrow-the gay and the thoughtless -it is good to be sometimes reminded of Death, and the Grave; not to fill them with gloomy thoughts and forebodings, but to lead them to the contemplation of higher and more lasting enjoyments than this life affords. A memento mori is not necessarily sad and forbidding, nor is the dirge-note always a fearful sound, for to the mind rightly trained and constituted, they speak of a blissful hereafter, and a glorified existence, for which this is but a state of preparation. Knowing and feeling this, we may stand in the church-yard without awe or dread, and looking through Death's open portals, into the regions of everlasting happiness beyond, exclaim : "The first tabernacle to HoPE we will build, And look for the sleepers around us to rise; Who bequeathed us them both when He rose to the skies." HERBERT KNOWLES. Let us ever remember, with EPHON, that "the flower sheds the same fragrance if it blooms in Eden or on a grave, and the same song which awakes the lark at morn may lull the dying at evening to repose;" and also that, "The sweetest flower in pleasure's path Will bloom on sorrow's grave."-JOHN CLARTM |