urple 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.

And so the procession swept on, till it had traversed the streets,
passed the city gate, and gained the Place of Tombs without the wall,
which the traveler yet beholds.

Raised in the form of an altar--of unpolished pine, amidst whose
interstices were placed preparations of combustible matter--stood the
funeral pyre; and around it drooped the dark and gloomy cypresses so
consecrated by song to the tomb.

As soon as the bier was placed upon the pile, the attendants parting on
either side, Ione passed up to the couch, and stood before the
unconscious clay for some moments motionless and silent. The features of
the dead had been composed from the first agonized expression of violent
death. Hushed for ever the terror and the doubt, the contest of
passion, the awe of religion, the struggle of the past and present, the
hope and the horror of the fu