VOICES FROM GOD’S ACRE
I like that ancient Saxon phrase with calls
The burial-ground God’s Acre. Longfellow.
The following lines are from “A Dirge,” by Rev. George Croly, an English clergyman and voluminous writer:
Earth to earth and dust to dust!
Here the evil and the just,
Here the youthful and the old,
Here the fearful and the bold,
Here the matron and the maid
In one silent bed are laid;
Here the sword and sceptre rust—
Earth to earth and dust to dust.
From Plato:
The sceptred king, the burdened slave,
The humble and the haughty die;
The rich, the poor, the base, the brave,
In dust without distinction lie.
In the last two lines of the “Elegy to the memory of an unfortunate lady”:
A heap of dust alone remains of thee;
’Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be,
Pope apparently had in mind the friendly admonition of Horace to Torquatus (Carm. iv. 7):
“Nos ubi decidimus
Quo pater Æneas, quo dives Tullus et Ancus,
Pulvis et umbra sumus.”
Over the grave of Dean Alford in the church-yard of St. Martin’s, Canterbury, is the following inscription, prepared by his own hand: “The inn of a traveller, on his way to the New Jerusalem.”
Daniel Webster’s epitaph, written by himself, at Marshfield, is as follows:
Lord,
I believe,
Help Thou
mine unbelief.
Philosophical argument,
especially that
drawn from the vastness
of the universe in compare-
son with the apparent insigni-
ficance of this globe, has some-
times shaken my reason for the faith
that is in me; but my heart has
assured me that the Gospel of Jesus
Christ must be a divine reality.
The Sermon on the Mount can
not be a merely human
production. This belief
enters into the very
depth of my con-
science. The
whole his-
tory of
man proves it.
In Greenmount Cemetery, Baltimore, on the monument to the memory of the great tragedian, Junius Brutus Booth, is the following inscription:
Ex vita, ita discedo
tamquam ex Hospitio,
in furvum regnum
inclytissimi Ducis; illinc
ire ad Astra.
Which may be translated: Thus I depart from life, as one leaves an inn, into the dusky realm of a most renowned leader; thence I go beyond the stars.
The Blue and the Gray
The inscription on the Soldiers’ Monument on the Common, in the City of Boston, is as follows:
To the men of Boston who died for their country on land and sea in the War which kept the Union whole, destroyed slavery, and maintained the Constitution, the grateful city has built this monument that their example may speak to coming generations.
It is hinted in the Boston newspapers that the inscription from the pen of President Eliot, of Harvard University, was suggested to him by the following lines sent to him by Professor James Russell Lowell:
To men who die for her on land and sea
That you might have a country great and free,
Boston rears this. Build you their monument
In lives like theirs at duty’s summons spent.
The woman’s Confederate monument in Charleston, S. C., bears an inscription beginning thus:
This monument perpetuates the memory of those who, true to the instincts of their birth, faithful to the teachings of their fathers, constant in their love for the State, died in the performance of their duty; who have glorified a fallen cause by the simple manhood of their lives, the patient endurance of suffering and the heroism of death, and who in the dark hours of imprisonment, in the hopelessness of the hospital, in the short, sharp agony of the field, found support and consolation in the belief that at home they would not be forgotten.
George Eliot
The inscription on the granite obelisk which forms George Eliot’s gravestone, besides recording her pseudonym and real name, with the dates of birth and death, bears the first lines of her poem, commencing:
Oh may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge man’s search
To vaster issues.
At Avignon, France, is the marble sarcophagus of John Stuart Mill and his wife, on the top of which is the following eulogy:
Harriet Mill,
The deeply regretted, and dearly beloved wife of
John Stuart Mill
Her great and loving heart, her noble soul, her clear, powerful, original intellect, made her the guide and support, the instructor in wisdom, and example in goodness, as she was the delight of those who had the happiness to belong to her. As earnest for the public good as she was generous, and devoted to all who surrounded her, her influence has been felt in many of the greatest improvements of the age; and will be in those still to come. Were there even a few hearts and intellects like hers, this earth would soon become the hoped-for heaven.
Scott
Sir Walter Scott died at Abbotsford, September 21, 1832, aged 61 years, and was interred in the family burying-ground in Dryburgh Abbey on September 26, 1832.
The Great, the Good, the nobly gifted mind,
To dust its mortal part has now resigned,
The ethereal spark now wings its flight on high
To mix with kindred spirits in the sky.
Fair Scotia mourns, the rich and poor deplore
That he, the child of genius, is no more!
Weep, classic Tweed, pour out your floods of woe,
Your great magician’s dead; a man who never made a foe.
Queen Elizabeth
Among the complimentary epitaphs which were composed for Queen Elizabeth was the following, as quoted in Camden’s Remaines:
Weep, greatest Isle, and for thy mistress’ death,
Swim in a double sea of brackish water:
Weep, little world, for great Elizabeth;
Daughter of war, for Mars himself begat her;
Mother of peace, for she brought forth the latter.
She was and is, what can there more be said?
On earth the first, in heaven the second maid.
The great Tudor queen, who was not deficient in taste, would assuredly have been displeased with such “fustian stuff” as this. What she really wanted may be gathered from Bacon’s “Character of Queen Elizabeth,” where he says:
“She would often discourse about the inscription she had a mind should be on her tomb. She gave out that she was no lover of glory and pompous titles, but only desired her memory might be recorded in a line or two which should very briefly express her name, her virginity, the time of her reign, the reformation of religion, and her preservation of the peace.”
Samuel Johnson
The Royal Commission on MSS. unearthed at Spencer House, St. James’s, London, the following epitaph by Soame Jenyns on Dr. Johnson:
Here lies poor Johnson; reader have a care;
Tread lightly, lest you rouse a sleeping bear.
Religious, moral, generous, and humane
He was; but self-sufficient, rude, and vain;
Ill-bred, and overbearing in dispute,
A scholar and a Christian and a brute.
Would you know all his wisdom and his folly,
His actions, sayings, mirth and melancholy?
Boswell and Thrale, retailers of his wit,
Will tell you how he wrote and talked and coughed and spit.
Beust
Count Beust directed that above his tomb should be inscribed:
Peace to his ashes; justice to his memory.
Elihu Yale
The founder of Yale University is buried in the church-yard of Wrexham, North Wales, ten miles from Hawarden. His tomb in front of the church door is inscribed with these lines:
Born in America, in Europe bred,
In Africa travelled, in Asia wed,
Where long he lived and thrived, in London dead;
Much good, some ill he did, so hope all’s even,
And that his soul through mercy’s gone to heaven.
John Harvard
In 1828 the Alumni of Harvard University erected a monument to the memory of its Founder at Charlestown, Mass. On the eastern face of the shaft, and looking towards the land of his birth and education, is this short inscription in his mother tongue:
On the twenty-sixth day of September, A. D. 1828, this stone was erected by the graduates of the University of Cambridge, in honor of its founder, who died at Charlestown on the twenty-sixth day of September, A. D. 1638.
On the opposite face of the shaft, and looking westward towards the walls of the University which bears his name, is another inscription, which, in consideration of his character as the founder of a seat of learning is expressed in the Latin tongue:
In piam et perpetuam memoriam Johannis Harvardii, annis fere ducentis post obitum ejus peractis, Academiæ quæ est Cantabrigiæ Nov-Anglorum alumni, ne diutius vir de litteris nostris optime meritus sine monumento quamvis humili jaceret, hunc lapidem ponendum curaverunt.
Cheyne
Dr. Cheyne, Physician-General to the Forces in Ireland, in his directions for interment after death, included the following epitaph:
Reader! the name, profession, and age of him whose body lies beneath are of little importance; but it may be of great importance to you to know that, by the grace of God, he was led to look to the Lord Jesus as the only Savior of sinners, and that this “looking unto Jesus” gave peace to his soul.
J. C.
Huxley
The followers of Professor Huxley and the Christian world at large read with interest these lines, which have been engraved upon his tomb:
And if there be no meeting past the grave,
If all is darkness, silence, yet ’tis rest.
Be not afraid ye waiting hearts that weep,
For God still giveth His beloved sleep,
And if an endless sleep He wills so best.
André
When Dean Stanley was invited to send an inscription for the André Monument at Tappan, it was a delicate and difficult task to avoid wounding the sensitiveness of either country, and he showed good taste not only in the composition of the English inscription, but also in the selection of the Latin one. In the latter case, however, the Dean was more happy in what he omitted than in what he admitted. He selected this very appropriate verse from Virgil: “Sunt lacrimæ rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt.” But the whole of the beautiful quotation stands (Æneid i, 461–2):
“——Sunt hic etiam sua præmia laudi;
Sunt lacrimæ rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt,”
which Dr. Anthon translates: “Even here has praiseworthy conduct its own reward, (even here) are there tears for misfortunes, and human affairs exert a touching influence on the heart.” What a bitter sarcasm the verse would have breathed if it had been cut in the André monument!
Stevenson
The inscription on the tomb of Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson, the Scottish poet and novelist, who died at Apia, Samoa, on December 3, 1894, reads:
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
“Here he lies where he longed to be,
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.”
The grave of an Indian apostle, St. Acpinquid, is on a high hill at York, Me. He was converted and passed fifty years in preaching to the sixty-six Indian tribes of the country, and died on the 1st of May, 1662, at the age of ninety-four. His funeral was conducted with great pomp, and the Indians sacrificed 25 bucks, 67 does, 3 ermines, 22 buffaloes, 110 ferrets, 832 martins, 240 wolves, 82 wildcats, 482 foxes, 620 beavers, 500 fishes, 99 bears, 36 moose, 50 weasels, 400 otters, 520 raccoons, 112 rattlesnakes, 2 catamounts, 900 musquashes, 69 woodchucks, 1500 minks and 58 porcupines. His tombstone bears the inscription:
Present, useful; absent, wanted;
Lived desired; died lamented.
Prince Christian
The cross erected over the grave of Prince Christian Victor in the Pretoria Cathedral burial-ground is one of early Irish design with kerb of granite, and the railing is of metal from old British guns. The inscription records that the Prince was a grandson of Queen Victoria, and on the three sides of the base are inscribed texts with the various campaigns of the Prince:
| “I have fought a good fight.” | |
| Hazara | 1891 |
| Mirwagai | 1891 |
| Isazar | 1892 |
| “I have kept the faith.” | |
| Ashanti | 1895 |
| Soudan | 1898 |
| “I have finished my course.” | |
| Natal | 1889 |
| Transvaal | 1900 |
The designs have been carried out from suggestions made by Princess Christian.
The epilogue to Dryden’s “Tyrannic Love,” intended to be spoken by Eleanor Gwyn, when she was to be carried off by the pall-bearers, closes as follows:
As for my epitaph, when I am gone,
I’ll trust no poet, but will write my own:
Here Nellie lies, who though she lived a slattern,
Yet died a princess, acting in St. Cath’rine.
Thus we have the real character of the actress, and the character she represented in the play.
This inscription on a Connecticut tombstone: “Here lies the body of Jonathan Richardson, who never sacrificed his reason at the altar of Superstition’s god, and who never believed that Jonah swallowed a whale.”
An enthusiastic materialist put a headstone over the grave of his wife in a cemetery at Nievre, France, upon which there is the following inscription: “Deprived of all vitality, here lie the remains of the material that formed Madame Durand. No cards and no prayers.”
Hibernicisms, it seems, sometimes find their way into France. Upon a tombstone in the cemetery of Pagny-la-Violle may be read the following inscription: “To the memory of Claudine Menu, wife of Stephen Etienne Renard, died January 28th, 1855, aged 44 years, regretted by her four children, Anne, Pierre, François and Barbe, all dead before her.”
When “Tom” Corwin, disappointed and discouraged by the poor result of his mission to Mexico, was on the point of sailing for home he wrote to a cousin in Ohio, saying that he had accomplished all that he could, and when he got back to his country he should want something to do. He suggested that he had in youth some skill in imparting knowledge, and might teach a country school. But in case he should die before he arrived at home, he asked that no costly monument should be placed above him, and that a simple stone should bear only this inscription: “Thomas Corwin, born July 29, 1794; died ——. Dearly beloved by his family; universally despised by Democrats; useful in life only to knaves and pretended friends.”
The greatest smoker in Europe died at Rotterdam, and left behind him the most curious of wills. He expresses the wish in his last testament that all the smokers of the country be invited to attend his obsequies, and that they smoke while following in the funeral cortége. He directs that his body be placed in a coffin, which shall be lined with wood taken from old Havana cigar boxes. At the foot of his bier, tobacco, cigars, and matches are to be placed. And the epitaph which he requests shall be placed upon his tombstone is as follows:
HERE LIES
TOM KLAES,
The Greatest Smoker in Europe.
He Broke His Pipe
July 4, 1872.
Mourned by his family and
all tobacco merchants.
STRANGER, SMOKE FOR HIM!
In the city of Amsterdam, Holland, is an epitaph with words signifying in English “exactly” under a carving of a pair of slippers. The inscription is over the grave of a rich old man, who, believing that he would only live a certain number of years, divided his fortune into yearly instalments, determined to have a good time. He calculated about right, and when he was dying he paid all his debts and found that he had nothing left but a pair of slippers.
The Florenca Illustrated of Leopoldo del Migliore, a famous antiquarian, informs us that the first inventor of spectacles was Signor Salvino Armato, which is confirmed by the inscription on his tomb:
Qui Giace
Salvino D’Armato Degli Armati
Di Firenze
Inventore Degli Occhiali
Dio Gli Perdonie a Peccata
Anno D MCCCXVII.
[Here lies Salvino Armato D’Armati of Florence, the inventor of spectacles. May God pardon his sins. The year 1317.]
Condell and Heminge
In the church-yard of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury, are interred two of the personal friends and stage associates of Shakespeare, Henry Condell and John Heminge, to whom the world owes a debt for the loving trouble they took in collecting the works of the great bard and publishing them in book form. With a modesty somewhat uncommon in that age, they refused to be regarded as editors, but, in their own words, they “but collected (the plays) only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend alive, as was our Shakespeare, by the offer of his plays to your most noble patronage.” On the front of the granite monument of these two Elizabethan actors is a tablet with the following inscription:
“To the memory of John Heminge and Henry Condell, fellow actors and personal friends of Shakespeare. They lived many years in this parish and are buried here. To their disinterested affection the world owes all that it calls Shakespeare. They alone collected his dramatic writings regardless of pecuniary loss, and without the hope of any profit, gave them to the world. They thus merited the gratitude of mankind.”
On the left tablet is the following:
“The fame of Shakespeare rests on his incomparable dramas. There is no evidence that he ever intended to publish them, and his premature death in 1616 made this the interest of no one else. Heminge and Condell had been co-partners with him at the Globe Theatre, Southwark, and from the accumulated plays there of thirty-five years with great labor selected them. No men then living were so competent, having acted with him in them for many years, and well knowing his manuscripts. They were published in 1623 in folio, thus giving away their private rights therein. What they did was priceless, for the whole of his manuscripts, with almost all those of the dramas of the period, have perished.”
Shakespeare’s Doctor
Under this heading the Allgemeine Wiener Medizinische Zeitung says that a gravestone in the church-yard of Fredericksburg bears an inscription which is thus translated:
“Here lies Edward Heldon, a medical and surgical practitioner, the friend and companion of William Shakespeare, of Avon. He died after a short illness in the year of our Lord 1618, in the seventieth year of his age.”
In St. Stephen’s church-yard, Launceston, Cornwall, is an epitaph whose quaintness reminds us of the appeal in the inscription on the gravestone of Shakespeare, in the Stratford Church, though without its blessing and menace:
’Tis my request
My bones may rest
Within this chest
Without molest.
In Ickworth Church, Suffolk, is the following tribute to Lady Elizabeth Mansel:
Just in the noon of life—those golden days
When the mind ripens ere the form decays,
The hand of fate untimely cut her thread,
And left the world to weep that virtue fled,
Its pride when living, and its grief when dead.
Little Ruth
Little Ruth, when she was living,
Had the best of Nature’s giving,
Innocent spirit, sober face,
Every charm of childhood’s grace;
Here this picture brings her back,
That remembrance may not lack
Something dear to feed upon
Now that our desire is gone.
If her memory fail to make
Calm within for her sweet sake,
Only wait a few more years,
Till enough is told of tears,
And our thought of her shall bring
Joy instead of sorrowing.
In the cemetery at Staten Island: “In Loving Memory of Arthur Winter, Dear Child of William Winter and Elizabeth Campbell Winter.
“Cold in the dust the perished heart may lie,
But that which warmed it once can never die.”
Inscriptions from Mount Auburn Cemetery:
“Shed not for her the bitter tear,
Nor give the heart to vain regret;
’Tis but the casket that lies here,
The gem that filled it sparkles yet.”
“Dust to its narrow house beneath,
Soul to its place on high,
They that have seen thy look in death,
No more may fear to die.”
“The mother gave in tears and pain,
The flowers she most did love;
She knew she should find them all again
In the fields of light above.”
“Here to thy bosom, mother earth,
Take back in peace what thou hast given;
And all that is of heavenly birth,
O God, in peace recall to heaven.”
“She lived unknown, and few could know
When Mary ceased to be!
But she is in her grave, and O!
The difference to me.”
“Not mortals now but cherubs bright,
They’ve left this world for realms of light.”
“There’s music in the courts above,
And hope to light thee on,
And memory for thy name on earth,
To live since thou art gone.”
“No pain, no grief, no anxious fear
Invade thy bounds. No mortal woes
Can reach the peaceful sleeper here,
While angels watch her soft repose.”
“When the last trumpet’s awful voice,
This rending earth shall shake;
The opening graves shall yield their dead,
And dust to life awake.”
“Thou art gone to the grave:
We no longer behold thee,
Nor tread the rough paths of the world by thy side,
But the wide arms of mercy are spread to enfold thee,
And sinners may die, for the Saviour has died.”
“Beneath this stone, in death’s embrace,
Thy body finds a resting place;
Sleep sweetly here, thou precious dust;
Grave, be thou faithful to thy trust,
Till Jesus calls and bids thee rise;
Then join thy spirit in the skies.”
“Each day of life demands a night’s repose,
And death is but a well-proportioned sleep;
So thy sweet life hath reached its destined close,
And wearied nature now her rest doth keep,
Waiting the dawn of a celestial morn;
For thou, loved sleeper, in thy day didst lend
To life new beauty, and with grace adorn
The Christian wife, the mother, sister, friend.”
Uhland’s beautiful epitaph on an infant was once pronounced by a critic in Blackwood to be untranslatable. The following version, attempted many years ago, is perhaps rather a paraphrase than a translation, and yet it follows pretty closely the words as well as the spirit of the original:
Thou art come and gone with footfall low,
A wanderer hastening to depart;
Whither, and whence? we only know
From God thou wast, with God thou art.
Better than this in spirit, by all that makes Christian faith and hope better than vague questioning, and fully equal to it in poetic merit, is the following by F. T. Palgrave:
Pure, sweet and fair, ere thou couldst taste of ill,
God willed it, and thy baby breath was still;
Now ‘mong His lambs thou livest thy Saviour’s care,
Forever as thou wast, pure, sweet and fair.
Another infant epitaph is striking in its simplicity and very solemn in its teaching:
Beneath this tomb an infant lies,
To earth whose body lent,
Hereafter shall more glorious rise,
But not more innocent.
When the archangel’s trump shall blow,
And souls to bodies join,
What crowds shall wish their lives below
Had been as short as thine!
Longfellow and Brooks
Of all the marbles that fill Westminster Abbey with the glory of great memories, says Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, not one speaks a language so eloquent as the bust of Longfellow. For it announces itself as a pledge of brotherhood recorded in the most sacred shrine of a great nation with which we have sometimes been at variance, but to whose home and race our affection must ever cling, so long as blood is thicker than water. The seemingly feeble link of a sentiment is often stronger than the adamantine chain of a treaty.
It is the province of literature, especially poetry, which deals with the sentiments common to humanity, to obliterate the geographical and political boundaries of nations, and make them one in feeling. The beautiful tribute of Englishmen to an American poet, giving him a place in their proudest mausoleum, by the side of their bravest, best, noblest, greatest, is a proof of friendship and esteem so genuine that it overleaps all the barriers of nationality.
To this tribute to Longfellow is now added a gracious memorial, by English people, of Phillips Brooks, in St. Margaret’s, Westminster, the parish church of the House of Commons. Dean Farrar, in speaking of the bishop’s unique personality, said he was “of all modern ecclesiastics the most famous.” The memorial window, remarkable for its highly artistic features, presents several impressive scenes, with texts representing the joyful, cheerful side of Christianity. Underneath are the words, “In Memory of Phillips Brooks, D.D., Bishop of Massachusetts, honored and beloved, A. D. 1894,” and again, below this, is a quatrain in Latin elegiacs, written by the late Dr. Benson, formerly Archbishop of Canterbury:
Fervidus eloquio, sacra fortissimus arte,
Suadendi, gravibus vera Deumque Viris,
Quæreris ad sedem populari voce regendam,
Quæreris—ad sedem rapte Domumque Dei.
Thus freely Englished by the son of the writer:
True priest of God whose glowing utterance stayed
The failing feet, the heart that was afraid,
Pastor and Friend, beloved, most desired,
Thy people called thee, but thy God required.
Tennyson’s epitaph on Sir John Franklin, the Arctic explorer, in Westminster Abbey:
Non hic nauta iacet fortissimus: ossa nivalis
Arctos habet, sed pars non moritura viri
Navigat inmensum auspiciis melioribus æquor
Limina non nostri dum petit alta poli.
[Not here: the white North has thy bones, and thou,
Heroic sailor-soul,
Art passing on thine happier voyage now,
Toward no earthly pole.]
Fixed in the wall of Freshwater Church as a memorial to Lionel Tennyson is a marble tablet on which these lines are inscribed:
Truth for truth is truth he worshipt, being true as he was brave;
Good for good is good he follow’d, yet he looked beyond the grave;
Truth for truth, and good for good! The good, the true, the pure, the just!
Take the charm “for ever” from them, and they crumble into dust.
The signature “A. T.” is not needed to show whose was the pen that traced them.
Sir Vincent Eyre, a retired Major-General of the Indian army, found the grave and tombstone of Keats, the poet, who died in Rome in 1821, and who was buried in the old cemetery for English Protestants, wholly neglected. The inscription on the stone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” was almost illegible from dirt and decay. He made a collection, repaired the grave, cleaned the tombstone, and placed a medallion of Keats on the wall near the grave, with the following acrostic:
Keats, if thy cherished name be writ in water,
Each drop has fallen from a mourner’s cheek,
A sacred tribute such as heroes seek,
Though oft in vain, for dazzling deeds of slaughter,
Sleep on not less for epitaph so meek.
Longfellow on Bayard Taylor:
Dead he lay among his books,
The peace of God was in his looks.
As the statues in the gloom
Watch o’er Maximilian’s tomb,
So these volumes from their shelves.
Ah! his hand will never more
Turn their storied pages o’er!
Never more his lips repeat
Songs of theirs, however sweet!
Let the lifeless body rest,
He is gone who was its guest;
Gone as travellers haste to leave
An inn, nor tarry until eve.
Traveller, in what realms afar,
In what planet, in what star,
In what vast aerial space
Shines the light upon thy face?
In what gardens of delight
Rest thy weary feet to-night?
Among the shortest epitaphs are “Resurgam,” “Miserrimus,” and Shelley’s “Cor cordium;” and, in a very different spirit, such as Thorpe’s Corpse, Finis Maginnis. A military epitaph on the tomb of a Captain in the cemetery of Montparnasse:
“Carry arms! Present arms!
“In place! Rest!...”
In the Witchurch graveyard, Dorsetshire, is this concatenation of names:
Arabella Jennerenna Raqustenna Amabel Grunter, daughter of John Grunter.
In Axminster church-yard:
Anna Maria Matilda Sophia Johnson Thompson Kettelby Rundell.
Grateful Memory
It is related of the poet Uhland that the King of Prussia offered him the Order Pour le Mérite, with flattering expressions of royal regard. Uhland, however, declined to accept it. While he was explaining to his wife the reason which moved him to refuse the distinction, there was a knock at the door. A working-class girl from the neighborhood entered, and presenting Uhland with a bunch of violets, said, “This is an offering from my mother.” “Your mother, child?” replied the poet; “I thought she died last autumn.” “That is true, Herr Uhland,” said the girl, “and I begged you at the time to make a little verse for her grave, and you sent me a beautiful poem. These are the first violets which have bloomed on mother’s grave; I have plucked them, and I like to think that she sends them to you with her greetings.” The poet’s eyes moistened as he took the posy, and putting it in his button-hole he said to his wife, “There, dear woman, is not that an order more valuable than any King can give?”
Over a sarcophagus in an English church are two winged angels, in attitude as if just descended from heaven, and holding by either side a scroll upon which is written in golden letters the following legend:
“In holiness and purity live, and in a high enlightened love, do ye to others as we would that they should do unto you. Peace be with you. Amen.”
From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
In Santa Croce’s holy precincts lie
Ashes which make it holier, dust which is
Even in itself an immortality,
Though there were nothing save the past, and this,
The particle of those sublimities
Which were replaced to chaos: here repose
Angelo’s, Alfieri’s bones, and his,
The starry Galileo, with his woes;
Here Machiavelli’s earth returned to whom it rose.
Somebody’s Darling
The first and last stanzas of an exquisite little poem by Miss Marie Lacoste, of Savannah, Georgia, commemorating an incident unfortunately too common in both armies during the sectional conflict, are as follows:
Into a ward of the whitewashed walls,
Where the dead and the dying lay—
Wounded by bayonets, shells, and balls—
Somebody’s darling was borne one day.
Somebody’s darling! So young and so brave,
Wearing still on his pale sweet face,
Soon to be hid by the dust of the grave,
The lingering light of his boyhood’s grace. ·
Somebody’s watching and waiting for him,
Yearning to hold him again to her heart:
There he lies—with the blue eyes dim,
And smiling, childlike lips apart.
Tenderly bury the fair young dead,
Pausing to drop on his grave a tear;
Carve on the wooden slab at his head—
“Somebody’s darling lies buried here.”
Bismarck
“I have only one ambition left, I should like to have a good epitaph.”
Prince Bismarck.
In answer to a suggestion of the Pall Mall Gazette to meet Prince Bismarck’s wish, the following epitaphs, among others, were received and published:
He sowed his iron hail o’er many a field,
And dyed in the red the harvest seemed to be
The bloom and fruit of golden unity.
Now, Europe, wondering, sees the furrows yield.
Here, on the verge of Prussia’s border,
Moulder the bones of Prussia’s warder:
Sound may he sleep when the coming thunder
Shall rock his castle walls asunder.
If dust ye seek, and dust alone,
Prince Bismarck sleeps beneath this stone,
But if his soul you seek, depart!
His Germans keep that in their heart.
Behold the power of Europe in his grip:
On others’ blood he built an Empire’s throne;
Undaunted pride purchased a grievous slip;
Himself his God—his foes his very own.
Around this tomb hovers the spirit great,
Which for too brief a span did animate
The mighty frame that silent lies below,
Leaving this world to wonderment and woe.
Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, whose nod
The anxious nations watched, as of a god—
He forged an Empire, swayed it in its pride,
And then, to show that he was mortal, died.
I ruled as King, and not in vain,
I tamed the Austrian and the Dane,
I curbed proud France (for Europe’s good),
I placed our borders where she stood,
I made Germania One and Free,
I fell. I saw adversity.
Bismarck lies here. Early and late
He strove to make his country great.
Did he succeed? Let Sedan, Paris, tell;
But silence keep on how, himself, he fell.
Look kindly on this spot, here Bismarck lies.
Death’s kiss’d away the terror of his eyes.
And the brave heart by leisure has been made
A child’s, of which the world was once afraid;
Cleansed is the “blood”—the “iron’s” lost in love,
And now Earth’s Prince is crown’d a King above.
War’s fiery furnaces have fused the race of Teuton blood,
’Twas Bismarck fanned the blaze;
To strong Germania has been shaped the molten flood,
And Bismarck owns the praise.
To the immortal Founder
of the
Fatherland’s Unity
this
Monument is dedicated
by the
grateful Germans,
who will admiringly remember, for ever and ever,
his high, patriotic aims,
his unwavering steadfastness and purpose,
his indomitable energy and courage,
and the eminently practical means by which he realized
the national aspirations.
What would Germany be without him?
A mere geographical expression.
His name will go down to Posterity as the Greatest
of his nation.
A Husbandman
The following lines on an agriculturist were written by Canada’s lyrist, C. G. D. Roberts:
He who would start and rise
Before the crowing cocks—
No more he lifts his eyes,
Whoever knocks.
He who before the stars
Would call the cattle home—
They wait about the bars
For him to come.
Him at whose hearty calls
The farmstead woke again,
The horses in their stalls
Expect in vain.
Busy, and blithe, and bold,
He labored for the morrow;
The plow his hands would hold
Rusts in the furrow.
His fields he had to leave,
His orchards cool and dim;
The clods he used to cleave
Now cover him.
But the green, growing things
Lean kindly to his sleep;
White roots and wandering strings—
Closer they creep.
Because he loved them long
And with them bore his part,
Tenderly now they throng
About his heart.
The Vienna Freie Fresse, found in Austrian cemeteries some curious epitaphs, translated as follows:
On a carter killed in a runaway:
“The road to eternity is not long. He started at 7 o’clock and arrived at 8.”
On a man of letters:
“Here lies the best man in the world. He deprived himself of sleep to bestow it upon others.”
One tomb bears a bas-relief depicting a peasant impaled on the horns of a bull. Below is the inscription:
“It was a bull’s horn that sent me to Heaven. I died in a moment, leaving wife and child. Oh, bull, bull! To think that I owe to you everlasting repose!
This does not speak well for the married life of F. K.:
“Here rests in God F. K., who lived 26 years as a man and 37 years as a husband.”