Rural Funerals by Washington Irving — Read

Here's a few flowers! but about midnight more: / The herbs that have oil them cold dew o' the night; / Are strewings fitt'st for graves -- / You were as flowers now wither'd; even so / These herblets shall, which we upon you strow. / Cymbeline

Among the beautiful and simple-hearted customs of rural life which still linger in some parts of England are those of strewing flowers before the funerals and planting them at the graves of departed friends. These, it is said, are the remains of some of the rites of the primitive church; but they are of still higher antiquity, having been observed among the Greeks and Romans, and frequently mentioned by their writers, and were no doubt the spontaneous tributes of unlettered affection, originating long before art had tasked itself to modulate sorrow into song or story it on the monument. They are now only to be met with in the most distant and retired places of the kingdom, where fashion and innovation have not been able to throng in and trample out all the curious and interesting traces of the olden time.