a kindness for graveyards, and a superadded leaning to the old, battered, weed-grown ones, are not incompatible with the cheeriest spirit. a marked distinction is to be drawn between the amateur and the professional haunter of the cœmetrion, the place of sleep. if the pilgrimage among marbles cannot be an impersonal matter, pray, sweet reader, keep to the courts of the living. the intolerable pain of meeting with some clear-cut beloved name; the chance of stumbling on some parody of the departed, under a glass case, or of brushing against the clayey sexton, fresh from his delving,—these are things whose risk one would not willingly run. therefore stick to antiquities, and let thy-131- fastidious eye look with favor at no carven mortuary date that was cut later than under the third of the georges. if there be a suspicion of scotch granite, or of landscape gardening in any god's acre as thou passest by, turn thee about to windward. but where there stand, in honest slate, armorial ensigns, gaping cherubs, and cheerful scythes and hour-glasses, labelled (as a child labels his drawing, "this is a cow") with "memento mori," or the scarcely less admirable truism, "fugit hora," then enter in, and read that chronicle, with its grassy margin, which the centuries have written.
here is the great dormitory; here sits the little god harpocrates, swinging on the lotos-leaf, his finger on his lips.
"no noyse here
but the toning of a teare."
thousands possess the earth in peace. are not spurius cassius and the gracchi vindicated, when the agrarian law prevails at last?
how paltry a thing is a monument to the dead, save as expressing the affection of survivors!cannot the liberal soil absorb, without comment, the vast number of lives so sadly inessential to the world's growth and beauty? it must needs forever be placarded to the stranger, who would fain not be critical concerning the failings of these old hearts, where john smith lies. it is not the chisel which keeps a memory alive. an inscription is superfluous for him whose deeds are graven in the book of life. many another, who has but elbowed his way selfishly through the world, is laid under all the figures of rhetoric, and is beholden to nothing better than an obelisk to speak him fair. "to be but pyramidally extant," says sir thomas browne, "is a fallacy in duration." a monument, "a stone to a bone," shows the terminus of the corporeal journey, and serves merely to mark the gateway through which something perishable, that was dear, has passed away.
think of the gloomy, pessimistic habit of the puritan colonists, surmounting every grave with a grinning skull, in tracery, when the benighted pagans, ages before, crushed out the material aspects of death beneath chaplets of roses, amaranth, and myrtle; imagery of the liberated insect, leaping to the sun with impetuous wings; poesy full of hopefulness and cheer; and the symbolic figure of an inverted torch over the burial pile! it might disparage the acrid sanctity of the forefathers to ask which of the two seemed worthiest to inherit immortality.
cotton mather, after his whimsical fashion, pronounces it as the best eulogy of ralph partridge, the first shepherd of the old duxborough flock, that being distressed at home by the ecclesiastical setters, he had no defence, neither beak nor claw, but flight over the ocean; that now being a bird of paradise, it may be written of him, that he had the loftiness of the eagle and the innocency of the dove. his epitaph is: avolavit.
the most exquisite epitaph i ever saw was one of an infant of german extraction, who died, at the notable age of sixteen months: "beloved and respected by all who knew him." wellnigh as pompous and as plausible is an obituary in favor of a similar lambkin, yet to be deciphered at copp's hill: "he bore a lingering sicknesse with-134- patience, and met ye king of terrors with a smile." one abigail dudley sleeps in a new england village under a white stone, professionally indicative "of her moral character;" a widow droops in effigy over a plymouth tomb, and states in large capitals that she has lost "an agreeable companion." near by is the harrowing script: "father. parted below;" and its sequel a yard's length off: "mother. united above." it flashes across your brain like a revelation of vandal atrocities.
what wondrously sweet lines old english poets wrote over the graves of women and children! think of carew's "darling in an urn;" of ben jonson's "elizabeth;" of "sidney's sister, pembroke's mother;" of drummond's "margaret;" of herrick's "on a maid," every word precious as a pearl; and of the wholly startling pathos wherewith one now without a name bewailed his friend:—
"if such goodness live 'mongst men,
bring me it! i shall know then
she is come from heaven again."
general charles lee, that sad revolutionary rogue, wrote in his last will and testament: "i do earnestly desire that i may not be buried in any church or churchyard, or within a mile of any presbyterian or anabaptist meeting-house; for since i have resided in this country, i have kept so much bad company while living that i do not choose to continue it when dead."
of roger williams, who was also granted solitary sepulture, a strange tale is told. there was question, some years back, of transplanting him from his sequestered resting-place to a stately mausoleum. the diggers dug, and the beholders beheld—what? not any received version of that which was he, but the roots of an adjacent apple-tree formed into a netted oval, indented with punctures not wholly unlike human features; parallel branches lying perpendicularly on either side; fibres intertwined over a central area; and lastly, two long sprouts, knotted half-way down, and terminating in a pediform excrescence wonderful to see. it was plain, thought the savants of p., that the apple-tree had eaten of ancient roger; now-136- who had eaten of the fruit of that apple-tree? verily, "to what base uses may we return!"
it was said of old by the english chrysostom: "a man shall read a sermon, the best and most passionate that ever was preached, will he but enter into the sepulchre of kings." let a tourist go through europe, from town to town, pausing in the porches of burial-grounds: shall he not touch the naked candor of governments and follow the hoary chronicle of ages backward with his hebraic eye? to him, the graveyard moss that eats out the charactery of proud names, is a sage commentator on mundane fame; and the humble mound to which genius and virtue have lent their blessed association inspires him with precepts beyond all philosophy. for history is not a clear scroll, but a palimpsest; and he who is versed only in the autography of his contemporaries misses half the opportunity and half the gladness of life.
the habit of providing for personal comfort anticipates an easy couch and a fair prospect for us at the end. how many men, from the royal-137- warriors of yore who willed their ashes to be carried into a far-away country, have chosen, and jealously guarded in thought, their to-morrow's place of rest? a superfluous care, when the unawaited waves of ocean have cradled thousands, and every battle-field opens to receive the staunch and strong! even for the sake of mysterious beauty such as hath thy holy hill, concordia! alert youth itself might harbor a not ungentle welcoming thought of death. yet that head which is confident of quiet sleep is scarce solicitous of its pillow. one last assurance vibrates, like triumphant music, in ears impatient of much speech upon a text so sacred. "to live indeed," it echoes, "is to be again ourselves, which being not only a hope, but an evidence in noble believers, it is all one to lie in st. innocent's churchyard as in the sands of egypt: ready to be anything, in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six feet as with the moles of adrianus."
