The lads looked at each other.
“Gray?” said one—
“Poet?” the other.
Then—this is solemn truth, dear Reader!—both uttered, with the unison and monotony of a church-response—“I really carn’t say!”
We pursued the little foot-path to the church. There would surely be some record there to satisfy our query. Stones should have tongues upon the soil that produces the Average Briton. “The summer’s late repentant smile” cast a pensive beauty over the country-side, made of the sequestered church-yard a home fair to see and to be desired when the “inevitable hour” should come. The wall has a luxuriant coping of ivy throughout its length. Prehensile streamers have anchored in the turf below and bound the graves with green withes. The ivy-mantle of the old square tower leaves not a stone visible except where it has been cut away from the window of the belfry. A new steeple rises out of the green mass. A modest and symmetrical pinnacle, but one that displeases prejudice, if not just taste, and which is as yet shunned by the ivy, that congener of honorable antiquity. It clings nowhere more lovingly than to the double gable, under the oriel window of which is the poet’s grave. This is a brick parallelogram covered by a marble slab. Gray’s mother is buried with him. A tablet in the church-wall tells us in which narrow cell he sleeps.
Just across the central alley the sexton was opening an old grave, probably that it might receive another tenant, possibly to remove the remains to another cemetery. A gentleman in clerical dress stood near, with two young girls. The grave-digger and his assistant completed the group. Caput applied to the clergyman, rightly supposing him to be the parish rector, for permission to gather some of the pink thyme and grasses from the base of the brick tomb. During the minute occupied by courteous question and reply, the contents of the grave were exposed to view.
“A ‘mouldering heap’ of dust!” said Caput, coming back to us, “Here and there a crumbling bone. A mat of human hair. Not even the semblance of human shape. That is what mortality means. Gray may have seen the like in this very place.”
We picked buttercups, clover, and thyme, some blades of grass and sprigs of moss, that had their roots in the fissures of the bricks, and as silently quitted the vicinage of the open pit. Every step furnished proof of the fidelity to nature of the imperishable idyl. It was an impossibility—or so we then believed—that it could have been written elsewhere than in that “church-yard.” The moveless arabesques of the rugged elm-boughs slept upon the ridged earth at our left; the yew-tree blackened a corner at the right. The “upland lawn” was bathed in sunshine; the
“nodding beech
That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,”