More or little, and then dumb.”
Shakespeare.
I acknowledge a hesitation in writing this chapter, because there are many people who feel very strongly upon the subject of the disposal of the dead, and whose feelings I wish in no way to appear to treat with anything but the greatest consideration.
The custom of burying the body has been in practice in England ever since Christianity was established here, and so completely did burial take the place of burning that the latter expedient has never been formally forbidden, or, until 1884, even referred to, in English law. It is well that this fact should be clearly understood, viz., that it is not illegal to dispose of a dead body by other means than by burial in earth (unless it should be proved a public nuisance at common law), nor has it been illegal in England in the past, but it has merely not been the custom, “inhumation” having been systematically practised for a thousand years.
It is natural that many beautiful thoughts should have been expressed by our greatest writers in connection with the burial of the dead; it has been a theme upon which poets have loved to dwell. The mourners, the lych-gate, the weather-worn stones, the solemn stillness, the yew-tree—they all furnish subjects for reflection and for verse. Tennyson refers in terms of tenderest meaning to the yew-tree in the churchyard in his “In Memoriam,” and even Tom Hood puts aside his joking mood when he thinks of it—
“How wide the yew-tree spreads its gloom,
And o’er the dead lets fall its dew,
As if in tears it wept for them,
The many human families
That sleep around its stem!”