The mole, that scoops with curious toil
Her subterranean bed,
Thinks not she plows a human soil,
And mines among the dead.
Yet, whereso'er she turns the ground,
My kindred earth I see:
Once every atom of this mound
Lived, breathed, and felt, like me.
Through all this hillock's crumbling mould
Once the warm lifeblood ran:
Here thine original behold,
And here thy ruins, man!
By wafting winds and flooding rains,
From ocean, earth, and sky,
Collected here, the frail remains
Of slumbering millions lie.
The towers and temples crushed by time,
Stupendous wrecks, appear
To me less mournfully sublime
Than this poor molehill here.
Methinks this dust yet heaves with breath—
Ten thousand pulses beat;—
Tell me, in this small hill of death,
How many mortals meet!
One idea, you see, beaten out rather thin, and expressed in a great many words, as was the good man's wont. And in these days of the misty and spasmodic school, I owe my readers an apology for presenting them with poetry which they will have no difficulty in understanding.
Amid a great number of particulars as to the burial customs of various nations, we find mention made of an odd way in which the natives of Thibet dignify their great people. They do not desecrate such by giving them to the earth, but retain a number of sacred dogs to devour them. Not less strange was the fancy of that Englishwoman, a century or two back, who had her husband burnt to ashes, and these ashes reduced to powder, of which she mixed some with all the water she drank, thinking, poor heart-broken creature, that, thus she was burying the dear form within her own.
In rare cases I have known of the parson or the churchwarden turning his cow to pasture in the churchyard, to the sad desecration of the place. It appears, however, that worse than this has been done, if we may judge from the following passage quoted by Mrs. Stone:—
1540. Proceedings in the Court of Archdeaconry of Colchester, Colne Wake. Notatur per iconimos dicte ecclesie yt the parson mysusithe the churche-yard, for hogis do wrote up graves, and besse lie in the porche, and ther the pavements he broke up and soyle the porche; and ther is so mych catell yt usithe the church-yarde, yt is more liker a pasture than a halowed place.