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THE SOUL A FLOWER. 827
118 b . When the innocent are pat to death, white lilies grow out
of their graves, three lilies on that of a maiden (Uhland s Volksl.
241), which no one but her lover may pluck ;
from the mounds
of buried lovers flowering shrubs spring up, whose branches
intertwine. In Swedish songs lilies and limes grow out of graves,
Sv. vis. 1, 101. 118. In the ballad of fair Margaret and sweet
William :
Out of her brest there sprang a rose,
And out of his a briar ;
They grew till they grew unto the church-top,
And there they tyed in a true lovers knot. 1
In Tristan and Isote I believe it to be a later alteration, that the
rose and vine, which twine together over their graves, have first
to be planted. In a Servian folksong there grows out of the
youth s body a green fir (zelen bor, m.), out of the maiden s a red
rose (rumena ruzhitsa, f.), Vuk 1, no. 137, so that the sex is kept
up even in the plants :
2 the rose twines round the fir, as the silk
round the nosegay. All these examples treat the flower as a
mere symbol, or as an after-product of the dead man s intrinsic
character : the rose coming up resembles the ascending spirit of
the child ; the body must first lie buried, before the earth sends
up a new growth as out of a seed, conf. chap. XXXVII. But
originally there might lie at the bottom of this the idea of an
immediate instantaneous passage of the soul into the shape of a
flower, for out of mere drops of blood, containing
but a small
part of the life, a flower is made to spring
in the blood, and as that ebbs away, she escapes with it. Greek
: the soul has her seat
fables tell us how the bodies of the persecuted and slain, espe
cially women, assumed forthwith the figure of a flower, a bush, a
tree (p. 653), without leaving any matter behind to decay or be
burnt ; nay, life and even speech may last while the transforma
tion is taking place. Thus Daphne and Syrinx, when they
cannot elude the pursuit of Apollo or Pan, change themselves
into a laurel and a reed; the nymph undergoing transformation
speaks on so long as the encrusting bark has not crept up to
1
Percy 3, 123 variant in Kob. Jamieson ; 1, 33-4.
2 Therefore der rebe (vine) belongs to Tristan s grave, diu rose to Isote s, as in
Eilhart and the chap-book ;
Uirich and Heinrich made the plants change places.