Syrinx, who, when they could no longer elude the pursuit of Apollo and
Pan, change themselves into a laurel and a reed. In modern times, Tasso
and Spenser have given us graphic pictures based on this primitive phase
of belief; and it may be remembered how Dante passed through that
leafless wood, in the bark of every tree 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):