"If such goodness live 'mongst men,
Bring me it! I shall know then
She is come from Heaven again."
General Charles Lee, that sad Revolutionary rogue, wrote in his last will and testament: "I do earnestly desire that I may not be buried in any church or churchyard, or within a mile of any Presbyterian or Anabaptist meeting-house; for since I have resided in this country, I have kept so much bad company while living that I do not choose to continue it when dead."
Of Roger Williams, who was also granted solitary sepulture, a strange tale is told. There was question, some years back, of transplanting him from his sequestered resting-place to a stately mausoleum. The diggers dug, and the beholders beheld—what? Not any received version of that which was he, but the roots of an adjacent apple-tree formed into a netted oval, indented with punctures not wholly unlike human features; parallel branches lying perpendicularly on either side; fibres intertwined over a central area; and lastly, two long sprouts, knotted half-way down, and terminating in a pediform excrescence wonderful to see. It was plain, thought the savants of P., that the apple-tree had eaten of ancient Roger; now who had eaten of the fruit of that apple-tree? Verily, "to what base uses may we return!"
It was said of old by the English Chrysostom: "A man shall read a sermon, the best and most passionate that ever was preached, will he but enter into the sepulchre of kings." Let a tourist go through Europe, from town to town, pausing in the porches of burial-grounds: shall he not touch the naked candor of governments and follow the hoary chronicle of ages backward with his Hebraic eye? To him, the graveyard moss that eats out the charactery of proud names, is a sage commentator on mundane fame; and the humble mound to which genius and virtue have lent their blessed association inspires him with precepts beyond all philosophy. For history is not a clear scroll, but a palimpsest; and he who is versed only in the autography of his contemporaries misses half the opportunity and half the gladness of life.
The habit of providing for personal comfort anticipates an easy couch and a fair prospect for us at the end. How many men, from the royal warriors of yore who willed their ashes to be carried into a far-away country, have chosen, and jealously guarded in thought, their to-morrow's place of rest? A superfluous care, when the unawaited waves of ocean have cradled thousands, and every battle-field opens to receive the staunch and strong! Even for the sake of mysterious beauty such as hath thy holy hill, Concordia! alert youth itself might harbor a not ungentle welcoming thought of death. Yet that head which is confident of quiet sleep is scarce solicitous of its pillow. One last assurance vibrates, like triumphant music, in ears impatient of much speech upon a text so sacred. "To live indeed," it echoes, "is to be again ourselves, which being not only a hope, but an evidence in noble believers, it is all one to lie in St. Innocent's churchyard as in the sands of Egypt: ready to be anything, in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six feet as with the moles of Adrianus."
