Funeral

“ A funeral train comes gliding by your bed, in which Passion and Feeling assume bodily shape and things of the mind become dim specters 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. ”

“ There are few ceremonies in life at once so touching, so impressive, so sad, and yet so beautiful as a soldier’s funeral! Ordinary funerals, with their unwieldy hearses and feathers, and the absurd looking mutes, and the “inky cloaks” and weepers of hired mourners, always seem to me like a mockery of the dead; the appointments border so closely on the grotesque; they are so little in keeping with the true, the only view of death that can render life endurable! ”

“ Every one knows the soul-subduing pathos of the funeral service, for who is so fortunate as never to have followed some one he has loved to the tomb? But when performed over the remains of innocence and beauty, thus laid low in the bloom of existence, what can be more affecting? At that simple but most solemn consignment of the body to the grave-“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust!”—the tears of the youthful companions of the deceased flowed unrestrained. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As she spoke a dark procession paced into the church. First came an old man and woman, like chief mourners at a funeral, attired from head to foot in the deepest black, all but their pale features and hoary hair, he leaning on a staff and supporting her decrepit form with his nerveless arm. ”

“ 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. ”

“ After a funeral it is natural enough for the mourners to dream of the dead, and they at once conclude that they have been visited by his revenant. After a funeral feast—a great gorging of pork or beef—it is very natural that the sense of oppression and pain felt should be associated with the dear departed, and should translate itself into the idea that he has come from his grave to sit on the chests of those who have bewailed him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ And the stars came out on thy bier to gaze.
As the mourning train through the wood defiles,
Their litany peals up the branching aisles;
The pine-trees, in funeral mantles dressed,
Moan prayers for the soul that is gone to rest. ”

“ Funeral orations, full of the most vehement eulogies, and interrupted by complaints and reproaches against the dead man for his unkindness in going away from them, are incessantly delivered. These ceremonies completed, they place the corpse in a kind of coffin, along with various emblems of the rank of the departed, and leave it to decay. ”

“ A public funeral was decreed as a national expression of the pervading grief at the irreparable loss of "two as gallant spirits as ever sacrificed life for the extension of science and the cause of mankind." ”

“ Mourning comes alike to all of us.
Grace had a desire to see the funeral procession passing across the river from the palace to the fortress, and I consented to go with her, feeling that nothing could make my spirits any lower. ”

“ The sweeping sound of the funeral train faded away like a thin vapor, and the wind, that just before had seemed to shake the coffin-pall, moaned sadly round the verge of the Hollow between three Hills. But when the old woman stirred the kneeling lady, she lifted not her head. ”

“ It is this that confers a sacred character on the funeral ceremony among all the nations of the globe; all are alike persuaded that the sleep, even of the tomb, is not everlasting, and that death is but a glorious transfiguration. ”

“ O may her prayers be answered!—Another week gone; a week of mercy, warning, blessing, inward exercise, and peace. On Tuesday night, I witnessed the deathbed scene of a neighbour: dying is hard work. At the funeral on Friday these lines were much impressed upon my mind:—
'So live, that, when thou tak'st thy last long sleep.
Dying, may'st smile, when all around thee weep:' ”

“ Whilst with the other he upholds his beam,
And sends the silver lash forth with a scream:
The goddess Mors [138] shall join the funeral train,
Close followed by the nymphs, arranged in twain;
Whose sun-brown’d faces shall be draped with care,
Their bodies plaited immortelles shall wear;
At each one’s side a tabour shall be slung,
Which, beaten, will enhance the mournful song. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then came a funeral—the sheeted corpse on the shallow cot, the brisk-pacing bearers (if he was good, the sooner he is buried the sooner in heaven; if bad, bury him swiftly for the sake of the household—either way, as the Prophet says, do not let the mourners go too long weeping and hungry) —the women behind, tossing their arms and lamenting, and men and boys chanting low and high. ”

“ 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 ”

“ A costly casket, a profusion of flowers and a long funeral procession merely gratify a foolish and ostentatious pride on the part of the survivors, and often entail a heavy burden on the father or husband. ”

“ All the morning the funeral knell has been tolling; the people listen, now, to the solemn words of a service which seem spoken by the dead man himself to those who mourn. They admonish and warn, but they bid them be of good cheer, lift up hearts, and trust in the Lord. ”

“ There is a sort of melancholy pleasure to be had out of a funeral, with its pomp and ceremony, but I shrank from a death-bed. ”

“ Eternal exequies.—One might fancy to hear a continuous funeral oration beyond the confines of history: we have ever been and are burying all that we love best, our thoughts and hopes, obtaining in exchange pride, gloria mundi, that is, the pomp of the funeral oration. ”

“ let the burial rite be read—the funeral song be sung!—
An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young—
A dirge for her, the doubly dead in that she died so young. ”

“ It is singular that a funeral consequent on an unusual death should be attended by greater numbers than an ordinary one. On this occasion, I may safely say, that my little retired burial-ground, and its immediate vicinity, were occupied by thousands. ”

“ THE IMMORTAL RESIDUE Wouldst thou find my ashes? Look
In the pages of my book;
And, as these thy hand doth turn,
Know here is my funeral urn. ”

“ If a prominent citizen died, he never failed to attend the funeral, and, where possible, to join the procession on the way to the cemetery. He would stand by the grave with bowed head, and take in every word of the funeral discourse. ”

“ The funeral services of the same people are not less interesting. At the death of one of their number, the body is stripped, laid out upon the ground, and the friends of the deceased assemble, forming a circle around it, and commence howling like so many demons. ”

“ All things that we ordained festival Turn from their office to black funeral- Our instruments to melancholy bells, Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast; Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change; Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse; And all things change them to the contrary. ”

“ Legends collect around the funeral, which was by cremation, after the "old* rule of the wheel kings." None could move the sacred coffin, which rose by itself into the air; none could light the funeral pyre, which became self-enkindled. ”

“ The doctrine is, that the whole ceremony connected with a funeral is gone through in rehearsal by spectres which are the shades, phantoms, appearances, taïshs, doubles, swarths, or whatever else we choose to call them, of living men, not merely by the shade of the person who is to die, but by the shades of all who are to be concerned in the ceremony. ”

“ FUNERAL, n. A pageant whereby we attest our respect for the dead by enriching the undertaker, and strengthen our grief by an expenditure that deepens our groans and doubles our tears. ”

“ More than this, the funeral is the occasion over all others in which costly presents far above the ability of the family are given to the poungyis, or priests. But real consoling service to the sorrowing they give none. ”

“ The will is not to be looked into, till the funeral rites are performed. Preparations are making for the solemnity; and the servants, as well as principals of all the branches of the family, are put into close mourning. ”

“ The funeral service was held in the Methodist Episcopal church, which was filled with friends who loved and honored my mother in life and sincerely mourned her death. A funeral sermon was preached by her pastor, Rev. M. N. Olmstead, from Acts xxvi, 8,—"Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you that God should raise the dead?"—in which the sorrowing family were led for comfort to the glorious certainty of the resurrection; and afterwards the sad procession took its way to the cemetery on the hillside. ”

“ Remembering her many virtues, we are indeed mourners at her grave and in the house of sorrow we would drop the tear of affectionate sympathy.
Sisters, brothers and friends, as we stand in this solemn presence we may hear the voice of this Providence speaking to us.
Not long shall we wait ere we obey the inexorable decree of Death and follow our sister.
How brief and full of mystery is human life! Who can fathom its purpose or discolse its issues. We entered life, as it were, but yesterday; to-day we perform our allotted task and to-morrow we go—who knows whither? ”

“ Those who were left behind, too ill to join the funeral procession, heard not always the returning footsteps of the muffled mourners, for sometimes Death again entered the house while they were absent ”

“ A. Folta. The large attendance at the funeral rites was evidence of the high esteem in which the deceased was held. In their hour of sorrow the mourning family has the condolence of their many friends. ”

“ At a church funeral the pallbearers sit in the first pews at the left of the center aisle; the family in those to the right. At a home funeral it is customary to have the family in some secluded room near the one where the coffin is placed and to have the clergyman stand in the hall between, or at the entrance of the drawing-room, where he may be readily heard by all. ”