of which was imprisoned a suicide.  In German folk-lore[30] the soul is supposed to take the form of a flower, as a lily or white rose; and according to a popular belief, one of these flowers appears on the chairs of those about to die.  In the same way, from the grave of one unjustly executed white lilies are said to spring as a token of the person’s innocence; and from that of a maiden, three lilies which no one save her lover must gather.  The sex, moreover, it may be noted, is kept up even in this species of metempsychosis[31].  Thus, in a Servian folk-song, there grows out of the youth’s body a green fir, out of the maiden’s a red rose, which entwine together.  Amongst further instances quoted by Grimm, we are told how, “a child carries home a bud which the angel had given him in the wood, when the rose blooms the child is dead.  The Lay of Eunzifal makes a blackthorn shoot out of the bodies of slain heathens, a white flower by the heads of fallen Christians.”

It is to this notion that Shakespeare alludes in “Hamlet,” where Laertes wishes that violets may spring from the grave of Ophelia (v.  I): 

      “Lay her in the earth,
  And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
  May violets spring.”

A passage which is almost identical to one in the “Satires” of Persius (i. 39): 

  “E tumulo fortunataque favilla,
  Nascentur violae;”

And an idea, too, which Tennyson seems to have borrowed: 

  “And from his ashes may be made,
  The violet of his native land.”

Again, in the well-known story of “Tristram and Ysonde,” a further reference occurs:  “From his grave there grew an eglantine which twined about the statue, a marvel for all men to see; and though three times they cut it down, it grew again, and ever wound its arms about the image of the fair Ysonde[32].”  In the Scottish ballad of “Fair Margaret and Sweet William,” it is related—­

  “Out of her breast there sprang a rose,
  And out of his a briar;
  They grew till they grew unto the church top,
  And there they tied in a true lovers’ knot.”

The same idea has prevailed to a large extent among savage races.  Thus, some of the North-Western Indians believed that those who died a natural death would be compelled to dwell among the branches of tall trees.  The Brazilians have a mythological character called Mani—­a child who died and was buried in the house of her mother.  Soon a plant sprang out of the grave, which grew, flourished, and bore fruit.  This plant, says Mr. Dorman,[33] was the Mandioca, named from Mani, and Oca, house.  By the Mexicans marigolds are known as “death-flowers,” from a legend that they sprang up on the ground stained by, “the life-blood of those who fell victims to the love of gold and cruelty of the early Spanish settlers in America.”