Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/833

Rh many and so full of interest that one knows not where or when to stop. There is the burial at sea—the most solemn of all—when upon the mighty ocean the little group gathers round the captain, and he commits the body to the waters until that day when "the sea shall give up her dead." There are the rare forms of funeral ceremonies; for, although the chief are those I have mentioned—earth-burial, burning, and embalming—yet these are not all. Some races merely expose the body without any protection, as some others actually put to death the aged and infirm. Strangest of all, the Parsees of India expose their dead to the fowls of the air on the Towers of Silence at Bombay, holding that earth, or air, or water may not be desecrated by contact with the lifeless body.

There are the great funerals of the world: of Alaric the Goth, the conqueror of Rome, who was inclosed in a golden coffin and buried in the bed of a river, which had been turned aside for the purpose and then turned back, those who knew the spot being put to death. Of Alexander the Great, from Babylon to Egypt, the grandest funeral the world has ever seen. Of Napoleon, the modern Alexander, when

 Cold and brilliant streamed the sunlight On the wintry banks of Seine; Gloriously the imperial city Reared its pride of tower and fane; Solemnly with deep voice sounded, Notre Dame, thine ancient chime, And the minute-guns re-echoed In the same deep, measured time; While, above the cadenced cortége, Like a dream of glory flits, Tattered flag of Jena, Friedland, Areola, and Austerlitz."

Of the good Queen Eleanor, wife of Edward the Confessor, that wife "whom living he had loved, and dead he had never ceased to love," and whose body the great king followed on foot from end to end of England, setting at each stopping place a cross, until he came to Charing Cross, in the very heart of London to-day, whence the body was borne to its final rest in England's mighty abbey. Of Israel's great leader on

 Nebo's rocky mountain height, on this side Jordan's wave, Where, in the land of Moab, there lies a lonely grave; And no man knows that sepulchre, and no man saw it e'er. For the angel of God upturned the sod, and laid the dead man there."

Of Him who was laid in the rock-hewn tomb of Calvary, "the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." Time does not permit us to dwell upon these, or upon the literature of the tomb—Longfellow's God's Acre, Gray's Elegy, Milton's Lycidas, and