Eulogy

“ In token of our hope that such an unfolding of spiritual life may come to us all, I scatter these flowers within the grave of our departed sister. May we cherish her memory and emulate her virtues.
Deposits her tribute and then, addressing the Worthy Patron, says:
Worthy Patron, within the grave, hallowed by the tenderest ties of human affection, we scatter these floral emblems of nature's loveliness and spiritual life. May we not trust all else to the Father's loving care? ”

“ The wedding cheer served for a sad burial feast, the bridal hymns were changed to sullen dirges, the sprightly instruments to melancholy bells, and the flowers that should have been strewed in the bride's path, now served but to strew her corse. Now instead of a priest to marry her, a priest was needed to bury her; and she was borne to church indeed, not to augment the cheerful hopes of the living, but to swell the dreary numbers of the dead. ”

“ The one buried that day I had known, or she had known me in my boyhood, and it was expected that I would attend. My mother sent the wreath that belongs,—there is both sense and sentiment in flowers at a funeral when they are wreathed by the hands of those who loved the dead, as is still the custom here; none where they are bought at a florist's and paid for with a growl,—and we stood around the coffin and sang the old hymns, then walked behind it, two by two, men and women, to the grave, singing as we passed through the gate. ”

“ A funeral train comes gliding by your bed, in which Passion and Feeling assume bodily shape, and things of the mind become dim spectres to the eye. There is your earliest Sorrow, a pale young mourner, wearing a sister's likeness to first love, sadly beautiful, with a hallowed sweetness in her melancholy features, and grace in the flow of her sable robe. ”

“ O come, and joyful show thy spouse his heir, And what the blessings of maternal care!
TO A LADY AND HER CHILDREN, ON THE DEATH OF HER SON AND THEIR BROTHER. O’ERWHELMING sorrow now demands my song: From death the overwhelming sorrow sprung. What flowing tears? What hearts with grief opprest? What sighs on sighs heave the fond parent’s breast? The brother weeps, the hapless sisters join Th’ increasing woe, and swell the crystal brine; The poor, who once his gen’rous bounty fed, Droop, and bewail their benefactor dead. ”

“ While you are admiring the flowers and trees a funeral enters the gates. The body is carried by four professional bearers and is followed by two priests and the relatives and friends. All the mourners are clothed in white. They walk two by two, no matter how distant may be the house of death, each couple holding a handkerchief as a symbol of their union in sorrow. When the procession reaches the top of the hill the mourners diverge and take seats in the house of prayer, where the sacred fire is burning, or they seat themselves in the beautiful garden for meditation and prayer. ”

“ Beside the usual groups who straggle through the place, to amuse themselves by reading the inscriptions on the tombs, you might see many individuals kneeling on particular graves, where some relation lay—for the benefit of whose soul they offered up their prayers with an attachment and devotion which one cannot but admire. Sometimes all the surviving members of the family would assemble, and repeat a Rosary for the same purpose. Again, you might see an unhappy woman beside a newly-made grave, giving way to lamentation and sorrow for the loss of a husband, or of some beloved child. ”

“ How much better to have a small funeral! a funeral remarkable for nothing but its modesty and simplicity, to which only the few are called who knew the dead and loved him, who follow him to his long home with serious thoughts, like thinking men and Christians, remembering that before long they must go with him into the grave and lie down beside him, and who return home to remember his soul before God as often as they kneel down to pray. ”

“ Disown'd its brief companionship.—One grave
Open'd for both.—Whom rivalry disjoin'd,
Nature in burial, as in birth made one.
Grief mark'd their obsequies, and the sad tribe
Like orphans mourning, heap'd the hallow'd mould. ”

“ Every circumstance of the funeral is meant to force joy upon the mourners. The child, dressed in white garments, and crowned with a wreath of flowers, is followed by the officiating priest in silk robes of the same colour; and the clergymen who attend him to the house from whence the funeral proceeds to the church, sing in joyful strains the psalm Laudate, pueri, Dominum, while the bells are heard ringing a lively peal. The coffin, without a lid, exposes to the view the little corpse covered with flowers, as four well-dressed children bear it, amidst the lighted tapers of the clergy. ”

“ A funeral procession is an imposing spectacle, and, to the uninstructed foreigner, a cheerful one; for there is nothing sad or sombre in the white, or bright-colored, robes of the priests, the white, tinsel-decorated bier, the red and white flags borne aloft, the enormous bunches of gay-colored flowers;—the very mourners in white silk, and with faces apparently unmoved by grief, bring no thought of the object of the procession to the Western mind. ”

“ And now his blessed body reposes in the cemetery with those of our many other brethren who have preceded us to the grave: we shall no more behold his sweet and loving figure; but his memory will always live with us, and we shall remember the luminous examples he has given us of prudence, amiability, profound piety and ardent love of labor and retirement. ”

“ At your death-bed how boldly might we comfort and encourage your departing souls! And at your burial, how comfortably might we leave you in the grave, in expectation to meet your souls in heaven, and to see your bodies raised to that glory! ”

“ Is it a comfort to them that their grief is shared? Truly, this consolation flows out to them in the richest streams, for hundreds and thousands are united in this common sorrow as one great family. The memory of this true nobleman will be green and blossoming in all our hearts, and his name will live in our imperishable reverence and affection. ”

“ Within there will be stillness and sadness, and in some darkened chamber, wrapt in a winding sheet, will lie the cold and lifeless form of some beloved member of your family—a father or mother; a wife or husband; a brother or sister; a son or daughter. After a little while even that will be taken away from you. {466} The time of the funeral will come. The mourners will go about the streets, and the dead will be buried out of your sight. ”

“ The husband,—deepest of all life’s bereavements,—perhaps it is he, for whom the funeral wail is now heard. What can time, and dust, and this tomb of earth, minister to her, who sits in the freshness of widowhood? ”

“ Again, a funeral always takes my attention and I find myself wondering whether the mourners could be helped or comforted by me, and I note whether the dead is young or old by the funeral trappings, and too often see that it is some tender child, though the grief is as great or greater when it is some dear wife or mother, or may be the father—the stay of some family. ”

“ It will not trouble either of us, for it matters little; we are to be together. This is all, except that, if it be practicable, I should like the burial to take place at the hour of sunset; this seems the most fitting time. While the grave is yet open, please let the children sing together, 'Sweet Rest;' I always like to hear them sing this. To-morrow evening I have something to say to the friends who really seem to belong to me,—Hal and Mary, Mr. Davis, Matthias, Aunt Peg and John, Jane and her husband. ”

“ Far through the gloomy perspective of the grave, I see the cheering, the delightful, prospect of immortal life, of a reunion with those beloved ones, an eternal reunion, and a rapturous vision of joys which eye hath not seen, and before which the momentary pangs of death dwindle into nothing. ”

“ In a book I have here, by a great man called Tertullian, who lived in the fourth century, it is said that the Christian Church of the first days turned the gloom of the funeral into a triumph, and that between the death and the burial their religious exercises were expressive of peace and hope. They felt that death could not and did not separate them from the love of their heavenly Father or from the fellowship of the saints ”

“ Yet no funerals are graced with more tears; nor can dirges and penitential mournings produce even a shadow of the tender melancholy which seizes the mind at the view of the formal and affected joy with which a Catholic infant is laid in his grave. ”

“ The citizens run in crowds, to mingle their tears with those of the disconsolate mother; they assiduously seek to lessen her grief, by the consolation of those vague and common-place discourses to which profound sorrow little attends; with her they surround the mournful bier, and they deck the obsequies with their mourning and presence; the train of this funeral pomp to them is a show ”

“ As our hero approaches home, his heart swelling with anticipation, he is greeted by the distant, solemn tolling of cathedral bells, too evidently funeral bells, and soon is met by a slowly moving, somber procession of black-robed monks and mourners, bearing to her last resting-place in the church-yard the very bride to whose fond greeting he has so ardently looked forward. ”

“ At his funeral the rich and great gathered to honor him, and after his body was lowered into its flower-hung grave, the poor peasants came by hundreds with their green boughs or sprigs of fern or wildflowers and filled his grave with them—because they loved him! ”

“ Such a practice as a wake, and the merry-making about the corpse, carry us back to the twilight of the world, with the poor savage in his bewildered misery, pretending that his dead still lived. Our funeral with its black trappings and its elaborate ceremonies is the lineal descendant of a merry-making. Our undertaker is, by evolution, a genial master of ceremonies, keeping things lively at the death-dance. ”

“ Resolved, While we would withhold our steps from the sanctuary of domestic grief, we may be allowed to express to the afflicted widow and children of the deceased, our unfeigned sorrow and sympathy in their great bereavement, and to tender them our assurance that while to their hearts the memory of the husband and father will ever be cherished, in ours will be kept the liveliest recollections of his virtues as a citizen and a friend. ”

“ I can recall no funeral in my time where simple grief and affection have been so openly and spontaneously displayed by so many strangers as well as friends—not even in France, where people are more demonstrative than here. ”

“ For the average Englishman loved a funeral and all its ghastly accompaniments as passionately as though he had Irish blood in his veins, and often insisted upon investing the burial of his friends with the mockery, rather than the sincerity, of woe. ”

“ We celebrate the anniversary of our ancestors, pay visits to their graves, offer flowers, food and drink, burn incense, and bow before their tombs entirely from a feeling of love and respect for their memory, and no question of 'dread' enters our minds in doing so. ”

“ Fit motto of many a disappointed gold-seeker, the finale of many a broken up, desolated home, the last dying words of many a husband, far away from wife or kindred, with no loved ones near to soothe his departing moments—no better burial—place than the very hole, perchance, in which his last earthly labours were spent. ”

“ The relatives and friends then hand the priest a list of the contributions and charities which have been subscribed in memory of the deceased, which concludes the ceremony of “rising from mourning,” or “the resurrection of the dead.” On each successive anniversary of the death of a Parsee funeral ceremonies are performed in his memory. An iron framework is erected in the house, in which shrubs are planted and flowers cultivated to bloom in memory of the departed. ”

“ The lone churchyard is dark and dim,
And the mourners raise a funeral hymn:
“Open, dark grave, and take her;
Though we have loved her so,
Yet we must now forsake her,
Love will no more awake her:
(Oh, bitter woe!)
Open thine arms and take her
To rest below!
“Vain is our mournful weeping,
Her gentle life is o’er ”

“ The exteriors of mourning, a decent funeral, and black habits, are the usual stints of common husbands: and perhaps their wives deserve no better than to be mourned with hypocrisy, and forgot with ease. But you have distinguished yourself from ordinary lovers, by a real and lasting grief for the deceased; and by endeavouring to raise for her the most durable monument, which is that of verse. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Indifference! That was the most marked characteristic of that funeral. You felt it everywhere, on the faces and in the hearts of the mourners, not only among all those functionaries, most of whom [Pg 146] had known the duke by sight only, but in the ranks of those on foot between his hearse and his coupé, his closest friends and those who were in daily attendance upon him. ”

“ The funeral was so economical and so private that neither the tongue of repute, identifying the grave from generation to generation, nor the more unerring evidence of shaft or vault guides the footsteps of those who come so late, so late! ”

“ Sisters and brothers, within the city of the dead, we consign to the bosom of mother earth all that was mortal of our departed sister.—The body we leave in the grave is but the casket which held the precious jewel of life. ”