drooping flowers, figuratively speaking

Prostrate here and there over the bones of Donjalolo's sires, the royal bacchanals lay slumbering till noon.

"Which are the deadest?" said Babbalanja, peeping in, "the live kings, or the dead ones?"

But the former were drooping flowers sought to be revived by watering....
(Mardi)

There are times thus, on the dullest march,and in the dullest life elsewhere, —when, as by accident, a general excitement comes, as the sudden whirlwind when the sun is reigning with the calmest tyranny; delightfully refreshing, like a shower to drooping flowers, they give our souls new spirit and power to rise from the moral drought of routine and dull material life. 

(Scenes Beyond the Western Border, July 1852; and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army)