O'er the sad threshold, where the cypress bough Supplants the rose that should adorn thy home, On the last pilgrimage on earth that now Awaits thee, wanderer to Cocytus, come! Darkly we woo, and weeping we invite-- Death is thy host--his banquet asks thy soul, Thy garlands hang within the House of Night, And the black stream alone shall fill thy bowl. No more for thee the laughter and the song, The jocund night--the glory of the day! The Argive daughters' at their labours long; The hell-bird swooping on its Titan prey-- The false AEolides upheaving slow, O'er the eternal hill, the eternal stone; The crowned Lydian, in his parching woe, And green Callirrhoe's monster-headed son-- These shalt thou see, dim shadowed through the dark, Which makes the sky of Pluto's dreary shore; Lo! where thou stand'st, pale-gazing on the bark, That waits our rite to bear thee trembling o'er! Come, then! no more delay!--the phantom pines Amidst the Unburied for its latest home; O'er the grey sky the torch impatient shines-- Come, mourner, forth!--the lost one bids thee come. As the hymn died away, the group parted in twain; and placed upon a couch, spread with a purple pall, the corpse of Apaecides was carried forth, with the feet foremost. The designator, or marshal of the sombre ceremonial, accompanied by his torch-bearers, clad in black, gave the signal, and the procession moved dreadly on. First went the musicians, playing a slow march--the solemnity of the lower instruments broken by many a louder and wilder burst of the funeral trumpet: next followed the hired mourners, chanting their dirges to the dead; and the female voices were mingled with those of boys, whose tender years made still more striking the contrast of life and death--the fresh leaf and the withered one. But the players, the buffoons, the archimimus (whose duty it was to personate the dead)--these, the customary attendants at ordinary funerals, were banished from a funeral attended with so many terrible associations. The priests of Isis came next in their snowy garments, barefooted, and supporting sheaves of corn; while before the corpse were carried the images of the deceased and his many Athenian forefathers. And behind the bier followed, amidst her women, the sole surviving relative of the dead--her head bare, her locks disheveled, her face paler than marble, but composed and still, save ever and anon, as some tender thought--awakened by the music, flashed upon the dark lethargy of woe, she covered that countenance with her hands, and sobbed unseen; for hers were not the noisy sorrow, the shrill lament, the ungoverned gesture, which characterized those who honored less faithfully. In that age, as in all, the channel of deep grief flowed hushed and still.