The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index

POE, LOWELL, LONGFELLOW, PARKMAN

Born in 1807, died in 1882; graduated from Bowdoin in 1825; traveled in Europe in 1826-29; professor at Bowdoin in 1829-35; again visited Europe in 1835-86; professor at Harvard in 1836-54; published Voices of the Night in 1839, Evangeline in 1847, Hiawatha in 1855, Miles Standish in 1858; Tales of a Wayside Inn in 1863, a translation of Dante in 1867-70, The Divine Tragedy in 1871, and many other volumes of verse; his prose writings include Outre-Mer, published in 1835, and two novels, Hyperion, published in 1839, and Kavanagh, in 1849.
The cemetery of Père Lachaise is the Westminster Abbey of Paris. Both are the dwellings of the dead; but in one they repose in green alleys and beneath the open sky—in the other their resting place is in the shadowy aisle and beneath the dim arches of an ancient abbey. One is a temple of nature; the other a temple of art. In one the soft melancholy of the scene is rendered still more touching by the warble of birds and the shade of trees, and the grave receives the gentle visit of the sunshine and the shower: in the other no sound but the passing footfall breaks the silence of the place; the twilight steals in through high and dusky windows; and the damps of the gloomy vault lie heavy on the heart, and leave their stain upon the moldering tracery of the tomb.

Père Lachaise stands just beyond the Barrière d'Aulney, on a hillside looking toward the city. Numerous gravel walks, winding through shady avenues and between marble monuments, lead up from the principal entrance to a chapel on the summit. There is hardly a grave that has not its little enclosure planted with shrubbery, and a thick mass of foliage half conceals each funeral stone. The sighing of the wind, as the branches rise and fall upon it—the occasional note of a bird among the trees, and the shifting of light and shade upon the tombs beneath have a soothing effect upon the mind; and I doubt whether any one can enter that enclosure, where repose the dust and ashes of so many great and good men, without feeling the religion of the place steal over him, and seeing something of the dark and gloomy expression pass off from the stern countenance of Death.