SEPULCHRES.
‘The hills,
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales,
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods; rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadow green; and, poured round all,
Old ocean’s gray and melancholy waste,
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man.’—Bryant.
he comparatively recent and widely-diffused interest in the establishment of rural cemeteries in this country is an auspicious reaction of popular feeling. Never did a Christian nation manifest so little conservative and exalted sentiment, apart from its direct religious scope, as our own. This patent defect is owing, in a measure, to the absence of the venerable, the time-hallowed, and the contemplative in the scenes and the life of our country; it is, however, confirmed by the busy competition, the hurried, experimental, and ambitious spirit of the people. Local change is the rule, not the exception; scorn of wise delay, moderation, and philosophic content, the prevalent feeling; impatience, temerity, and self-confidence, the characteristic impulse; houses are locomotive, church edifices turned into post-offices, and even theatres; ancestral domains are bartered away in the second generation; old trees bow to the axe; the very sea is encroached upon, and landmarks are removed almost as soon as they grow familiar; change, which is the life of Nature, seems to be regarded as not less the vital element of what is called local improvement and prosperity; the future is almost exclusively regarded, and the past contemned.
If a man cites the precedents of experience, he is sneered at as a ‘fogy;’ if he has a competence, he risks it in speculation; newspapers usurp the attention once given to standard lore; the picturesque rocks of the rural wayside are defiled by quack advertisements, the arcana of spirituality degraded by legerdemain, the dignity of reputation sullied by partisan brutality, the graces of social refinement abrogated by a mercenary standard, the lofty aims of science levelled by charlatan tricks, and independence of character sacrificed to debasing conformity; observation is lost in locomotion, thought in action, ideality in materialism. Against this perversion of life the sanctity of death protests, often vainly to the general mind, but not ineffectually to the individual heart.
When it was attempted to secure the collection of Egyptian antiquities brought hither by Dr. Abbott, of Cairo, for a future scientific museum to be established in New York, the representatives—commercial, professional, and speculative—of ‘Young America’ scorned the bare idea of exchanging gold for mummies, sepulchral lamps, papyrus, and ancient utensils and inscriptions; yet, within a twelvemonth, a celebrated German philologist, a native biblical scholar, and a lecturer on the History of Art, eagerly availed themselves of these contemned relics to prove and illustrate their respective subjects; and the enlightened of Gotham’s utilitarian citizens acknowledged that the trophies of the past were essential to elucidate and confirm the wisdom of the present. It is this idolatry of the immediate which stultifies republican perception. Offer a manuscript to a publisher, and he instantly inquires if it relates to the questions of the day; if not, it is almost certain to be rejected without examination. The conservative element of social life is merged in gregarious intercourse; the youth looks not up to age; the maiden’s susceptibilities are hardened by premature and promiscuous association; external success is glorified, private consistency unhonoured; art becomes a trade, literature an expedient, reform fanaticism; aspiration is chilled, romance outgrown, life unappreciated; and all because the vista of departed time is cut off from our theory of moral perspective, and existence itself is regarded merely as an opportunity for instant and outward success, not a link in an eternal chain reaching ‘before and after.’
Sentiment is the great conservative principle of society; those instincts of patriotism, local attachment, family affection, human sympathy, reverence for truth, age, valour, and wisdom, so often alive and conscious in the child, and overlaid or perverted in the man,—for the culture of which our educational systems, habitual vocations, domestic and social life, make so little provision,—are, in the last analysis, the elements of whatever is noble, efficient, and individual in character; in every moral crisis we appeal to them, as the channels whereby we are linked to God and humanity, and through which alone we can realize just views or lawful action. In our normal condition they may not be often exhibited; yet none the less they constitute the latent force of civil society. To depend upon intelligence and will is, indeed, the creed of the age, and especially of this Republic; but these powers, when unhallowed by the primal and better instincts, react and fail of their end. It is so in individual experience and in national affairs. The absence of the sentiments which the pride of intellect and the brutality of self-will thus repudiate, is the occasion of our greatest errors; to them is the final appeal, through them the only safety; and their violation was the precursor of base and bloody treason; their vindication but the renewal through sacrifice of a normal and vital interest of human society. The war for the Union has been expiatory not less than patriotic. And the great lesson taught by these and similar errors is, that the life, the spirit, the faith of the country had, by a long course of national prosperity and a blind worship of outward success, become gradually but inevitably material; so that motives of patriotism, of reverence, of courtesy, of generous sympathy,—in a word, the sentiments, as distinguished from the passions and the will, had ceased to be recognized as legitimate, and the reliable springs of action and guides of life. It was the repudiation of these which horrified Burke at the outbreak of the French Revolution; he augured the worst from that event, at the best hour of its triumph, because it stripped Humanity of her divine attribute of sentiment, and left her to shiver naked in the cold light of reason and will, unredeemed by the sense of justice, of beauty, of compassion, of honourable pride, which under the name of chivalry he lamented as extinct. He spoke and felt as a man whose brain was kindled by his heart, and whose heart retained the pure impulse of these sacred instincts, and knew their value as the medium of all truth and the basis of civil order. They were temporarily quenched in France by the frenzy of want; they are inactive and in abeyance here, through the gross pressure of material prosperity and mercenary ambition. Hence whatever effectively appeals to them, and whoever sincerely recognizes them, whether by example or precept, in a life or a poem, through art or rhetoric, in respect for the past, love of nature, or devotion to truth and beauty, excites our cordial sympathy. In this age and land, no man is a greater benefactor than he who scorns the worldly and narrow philosophy of life which degrades to a material, unaspiring level the tone of mind and the tendency of the affections. If he invent a character, lay out a domain, erect a statue, weave a stanza, write a paragraph, utter a word, or chant a melody which stirs in any breast the love of the beautiful, admiration for the heroic, or the chastening sense of awe,—any sentiment, in truth, which partakes of disinterestedness, and merges self ‘in an idea dearer than self,’—uplifts, expands, fortifies, intensifies, and therefore inspires,—he is essentially and absolutely a benefactor to society, a genuine though perhaps unrecognized champion of what is ‘highest in man’s nature’ against what is ‘lowest in man’s destiny.’ And not the least because the most universal of these higher and holier feelings is the sentiment of Death, consecrating its symbols, guarding its relics, and keeping fresh and sacred its memories.