Arizona weekly enterprise., 1882-12-23
Funereal Flowers.

Of all the esthetic and decorative uses of flowers the most delicate and per picking are at times of death and burial. Who can treat a theme reaching so many broken hearts and darkened homes with gentle, wholesome touch! For something of Christian hope, and the far outlook of faith, have penetrated the savage. half-heathen spirit of funeral observances years ago, and the old ghastliness and terror have given place to something better.
 Jesus lives! No longer new,'' would have broken upon such solemn:- ties with almost intrusive, jarring clam or, once upon time; and the presense of flowers in the chamber of departure -on the coffin-at the solemn burial of the dead, savored of downright flip pancy. So much for the slumberous, long-clinging shadows of the old Puri- tan darkness! Yet in the truest elegy in uninspired song we see the poet strewing blossoms aud wreaths in his opening lines:
 'Yet once more, ye laurels, and once more, Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, come to pluck your berries harsh and crude; And with forced fingers rude,
 Scatter your leaves before the mellowina
 year."
 And in the fearful climacteric flowers are more forceful than words:
 "* return Sic ian Muse,
 And call the wales and bid them hither cast Their bells and howerets of thousand hues. Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies. The tufted crow-toe, and pale iessamine,
 The white pink, and the pansy freaked with
 The glowing voilet,
 The musk-rose and the well-attained woodbine,
 With ,cowslips wan that hang the pensive And every flower that sad embroidery wears:
 Bid Amaranthus all his beauty shed, And dafrodillies fill their cups with tears,
 To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies"
 Surely, no dreadful hintings of latter day floral hysteria disturbed the poets vision; no fell portents of it's undertakers horrors in the way of floral tributes" and ''emblems," and offerings" of prim, milliner-like crosses, and wreaths, and crowns, aud sundry other nameless. innumerables properties of lugubri- ous catholicism. each and all conspicu- ously labeled with visiting card, and strung on the arm of the vampire-like attendants a'sortuary, and sometimes al- most sufficating the officiating clergy then borne along in the hearse, in the undertakers' open wagons, in carriages after the dead, bother, nuisance, and positive torment at the grave side,, or the door of the waiting tomb-surely the poet never suffered such unwhole- some provisions. or Lvcidas would have been buried altogether after a different manner, and we should have lost the crowning elegiac in any language. "Pease omit howers,' we may then understand, not as 8 repudiation of their silent, prescious ministry, but quiet declaration of the reserved rights'' of the sorrowful-a claim that kindred hands shall provide all these half-sacred offices of floral ministry; an intimation that sympathy shall stop short of off ciousness and that ostentatious conven- tionalities shall not break in upon the privileged sorrows of bereavement. There is no vicarious expression of joy CT grief. The florist cannot put into his constructions and designs the elo- quence of loving grief, with which the mother winds her few flowers for the adornment of her dead babel From her hands they catch language all hearts interpret, and no one misunderstands the mute elegy. We insist upon rev. erent recognition of this principle, and protest against the brassy. pitiless in- trusion of traffic and conventionality.- Chnrcltnaan.