Not far from the church, up a swell of the land, lies the burying-ground—a sunny spot. Pines here and there, also hemlocks and trees which stand bare after the fall of leaves. But all is bright and open, not a hideous stone-quarry such as in our day vanity or untaught taste makes of resting-places of our dead. Gay-colored mushrooms waste their luxurious gaudiness between the trees, and steadfast myrtle, with an added depth to its green from the air’s clarity, binds the narrow mounds with ever-lengthening cords.
But whether they are purple with the violets of May or with Michaelmas daisies, there is rest over all these mounds—“über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’.” Daily gossip and sympathy these neighbors had. The man of this grave was he who passed many times a day up and down the path by the gooseberry-bushes and bore the foaming milk. He is as voiceless now as the flies that buzzed about his shining pail. And the widow who dwelt across the road—she of the sad eyes who sat always at her loom, for her youthful husband was of those who never came back from the massacre of Fort William Henry—she to whom this man hauled a sled of wood for every two he brought to his own door, to whom his family carried elderberry wine, cider, and home mince-meat on Thanksgiving—she, too, is voiceless even of thanks, her body lying over yonder, now in complete rest—no loom, no treadle, no thumping, no whirring of spinning-wheel, no narrow pinching and poverty, her soul of heroic endurance joined with her long separate soldier soul of action.
The pathos of their lives and the warmth of their humanity!—however coated with New England austerity. Many touching stories these little headstones tell—as this:
“To the memory of Mrs. Abigail, Consort of Mr. Joseph Merrill, who died May 3rd, 1767, in the 52 year of her age.”
A consort in royal dignity and poetry is a sharer of one’s lot. Mr. Joseph Merrill had no acquaintance with the swagger and pretension of courts, and he knew no poetry save his hill-side, his villagers, and the mighty songs of the Bible. He was a plain, simple, Yankee husbandman, round-shouldered from carrying heavy burdens, coarse-handed from much tilling of the earth and use of horse and cattle. While he listened to sermons in the white church down the slope, his eyes were often heavy for need of morning sleep; and many a Sunday his back and knees ached from lack of rest as he stood beside the sharer of his fortunes in prayer. Yet his simple memorial warms the human heart one hundred and thirty-eight years after his “consort” had for the last time folded her housewifely hands.
“Of sa great faith and charitie,
With mutuall love and amitie:
That I wat an mair heavenly life,
Was never betweene man and wife.”
It was doubtless with Master Merrill as with the subject of an encomium of Charles Lamb’s. “Though bred a Presbyterian,” says Lamb of Joseph Paice, “and brought up a merchant, he was the finest gentleman of his time.”
In May, 1767, when this sharer of humble fortune lay down to rest, the Stamp Act had been repealed but fourteen months. The eyes of the world were upon Pitt and Burke and Townshend—and Franklin whose memorable examination before the House of Commons was then circulating as a news pamphlet. The social gossip of the day—as Lady Sarah Lennox’s wit recounts—had no more recognition of the villagers than George the Fourth.
But American sinews and muscles such as these hidden on the Litchfield Hills were growing in daily strength by helpful, human exercise, and their “well-lined braine” was reasoning upon the Declaratory Act that “Parliament had power to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever.”
Another stone a few paces away has quite another story: