With charitable bill bring thee all these.
And in William Collins’s Dirge to Cymbeline are the lines:
The redbreast oft at evening hours
Shall kindly lend his little aid,
With heavy moss, and gathered flowers,
To deck the ground where thou art laid.
The conceit is far more ancient than Shakespeare or Gay or even than Robert Yarrington—who, in 1601, wrote a ballad on it concluding,
No buriall this pretty pair of any man receives
Till Robin Redbreast piously did cover them with leaves—
for Horace relates in one of his poems how he as a child wandering one day on Mount Vultur fell wearily asleep, and was covered by protecting doves with laurel and myrtle leaves.