A KINDNESS for graveyards, and a superadded leaning to the old, battered, weed-grown ones, are not incompatible with the cheeriest spirit. A marked distinction is to be drawn between the amateur and the professional haunter of the cœmetrion, the place of sleep. If the pilgrimage among marbles cannot be an impersonal matter, pray, sweet reader, keep to the courts of the living. The intolerable pain of meeting with some clear-cut beloved name; the chance of stumbling on some parody of the departed, under a glass case, or of brushing against the clayey sexton, fresh from his delving,—these are things whose risk one would not willingly run. Therefore stick to antiquities, and let thy fastidious eye look with favor at no carven mortuary date that was cut later than under the third of the Georges. If there be a suspicion of Scotch granite, or of landscape gardening in any God's acre as thou passest by, turn thee about to windward. But where there stand, in honest slate, armorial ensigns, gaping cherubs, and cheerful scythes and hour-glasses, labelled (as a child labels his drawing, "This is a cow") with "Memento mori," or the scarcely less admirable truism, "Fugit hora," then enter in, and read that chronicle, with its grassy margin, which the centuries have written.
Here is the great dormitory; here sits the little god Harpocrates, swinging on the lotos-leaf, his finger on his lips.
"No noyse here
But the toning of a teare."
Thousands possess the earth in peace. Are not Spurius Cassius and the Gracchi vindicated, when the Agrarian law prevails at last?
How paltry a thing is a monument to the dead, save as expressing the affection of survivors! Cannot the liberal soil absorb, without comment, the vast number of lives so sadly inessential to the world's growth and beauty? It must needs forever be placarded to the stranger, who would fain not be critical concerning the failings of these old hearts, where John Smith lies. It is not the chisel which keeps a memory alive. An inscription is superfluous for him whose deeds are graven in the book of life. Many another, who has but elbowed his way selfishly through the world, is laid under all the figures of rhetoric, and is beholden to nothing better than an obelisk to speak him fair. "To be but pyramidally extant," says Sir Thomas Browne, "is a fallacy in duration." A monument, "a stone to a bone," shows the terminus of the corporeal journey, and serves merely to mark the gateway through which something perishable, that was dear, has passed away.
Think of the gloomy, pessimistic habit of the Puritan colonists, surmounting every grave with a grinning skull, in tracery, when the benighted pagans, ages before, crushed out the material aspects of death beneath chaplets of roses, amaranth, and myrtle; imagery of the liberated insect, leaping to the sun with impetuous wings; poesy full of hopefulness and cheer; and the symbolic figure of an inverted torch over the burial pile! It might disparage the acrid sanctity of the forefathers to ask which of the two seemed worthiest to inherit immortality.
Cotton Mather, after his whimsical fashion, pronounces it as the best eulogy of Ralph Partridge, the first shepherd of the old Duxborough flock, that being distressed at home by the ecclesiastical setters, he had no defence, neither beak nor claw, but flight over the ocean; that now being a bird of Paradise, it may be written of him, that he had the loftiness of the eagle and the innocency of the dove. His epitaph is: AVOLAVIT.
The most exquisite epitaph I ever saw was one of an infant of German extraction, who died, at the notable age of sixteen months: "Beloved and respected by all who knew him." Wellnigh as pompous and as plausible is an obituary in favor of a similar lambkin, yet to be deciphered at Copp's Hill: "He bore a Lingering sicknesse with Patience, and met ye King of Terrors with a Smile." One Abigail Dudley sleeps in a New England village under a white stone, professionally indicative "of her moral character;" a widow droops in effigy over a Plymouth tomb, and states in large capitals that she has lost "an agreeable companion." Near by is the harrowing script: "Father. Parted Below;" and its sequel a yard's length off: "Mother. United Above." It flashes across your brain like a revelation of Vandal atrocities.
What wondrously sweet lines old English poets wrote over the graves of women and children! Think of Carew's "darling in an urn;" of Ben Jonson's "Elizabeth;" of "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother;" of Drummond's "Margaret;" of Herrick's "On a Maid," every word precious as a pearl; and of the wholly startling pathos wherewith one now without a name bewailed his friend:—