So also Tennyson:—
"And from his ashes may be made
The violet of his native land."
In Memoriam
We find the same idea again, I suppose, in the eastern original of Fitzgerald's well-known stanza:—
"And this delightful Herb whose tender Green
Fledges the River's Lip on which we lean—
Ah, lean upon it lightly! for who knows
From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen!"
The soil of a garden is a veritable charnel-house of vegetable and animal matter, and from one point of view represents death and decay, but the coltsfoot covering an abandoned heap of refuse, or the briar growing amid ruin, shows that Nature only needs time to make it all beautiful again. Let us think of the body as transmuted, not as stored.