But the vast and absorbing importance attached by the ancients to the performance of every ceremonial connected with the death of a relation, had, as yet, confined her woe and her convictions to the chamber of the deceased.  Alas! it was not for her to perform that tender and touching office, which obliged the nearest relative to endeavor to catch the last breath—­the parting soul—­of the beloved one:  but it was hers to close the straining eyes, the distorted lips:  to watch by the consecrated clay, as, fresh bathed and anointed, it lay in festive robes upon the ivory bed; to strew the couch with leaves and flowers, and to renew the solemn cypress-branch at the threshold of the door.  And in these sad offices, in lamentation and in prayer, Ione forgot herself.  It was among the loveliest customs of the ancients to bury the young at the morning twilight; for, as they strove to give the softest interpretation to death, so they poetically imagined that Aurora, who loved the young, had stolen them to her embrace; and though in the instance of the murdered priest this fable could not appropriately cheat the fancy, the general custom was still preserved.

The stars were fading one by one from the grey heavens, and night slowly receding before the approach of morn, when a dark group stood motionless before Ione’s door.  High and slender torches, made paler by the unmellowed dawn, cast their light over various countenances, hushed for the moment in one solemn and intent expression.  And now there arose a slow and dismal music, which accorded sadly with the rite, and floated far along the desolate and breathless streets; while a chorus of female voices (the Praeficae so often cited by the Roman poets), accompanying the Tibicen and the Mysian flute, woke the following strain: 

The funeral dirge

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.