“Larded with sweet flowers;
Which bewept to the grave did go
With true-love showers.”
Then, further on (v. 1), there is the affecting flower-strewing scene, where the Queen, standing over the grave of Ophelia, bids her a long farewell:
“Sweets to the sweet: farewell!
I hop’d thou should’st have been my Hamlet’s wife;
I thought thy bride-bed to have deck’d, sweet maid,
And not have strew’d thy grave.”
In “Romeo and Juliet” (iv. 5), Capulet says:
“Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse.”
And further on (v. 3) the Page says:
“He came with flowers to strew his lady’s grave.”[738]
Once more, in “Pericles” (iv. 1), Marina is introduced, entering with a basket of flowers, uttering these sad words:
“No, I will rob Tellus of her weed,
To strew thy green with flowers; the yellows, blues,
The purple violets, and marigolds,
Shall, as a carpet, hang upon thy grave,
While summer days do last.”
Flowers, which so soon droop and wither, are, indeed, sweet emblems of that brief life which is the portion of mankind in this world, while, at the same time, their exquisite beauty is a further type of the glory that awaits the redeemed hereafter, when, like fair flowers, they shall burst forth in unspeakable grandeur on the resurrection morn. There is a pretty custom observed in South Wales on Palm Sunday, of spreading fresh flowers upon the graves of friends and relatives, the day being called Flowering Sunday.