Which there shall stand, untouched by dim decay,
While like thy waters we shall lapse away.
The following letter is a reply to one of Lord Howden’s, giving an account of a cenotaph, with its inscription, which he had erected to the memory of Colonel St. George, his half brother, in a church which had just been built by him on his property in Yorkshire.
TO LORD HOWDEN.
April 5, 1822.
I sincerely thank you for the sadly pleasing satisfaction I derive from seeing you so deeply imbued with those recollections which will fade among the last of mine. It is pleasing to see springing up in acts of solemn tenderness, those seeds of friendship sown so many years since. Affection so constant it is honourable both to feel and inspire. Your inscription, in its dignified and unaffecting brevity, is perfectly consistent with truth, and says much in few words.
Honours to the dead seem particularly consonant to the spirit of the Christian religion. When the great Author and Finisher of our faith implied an approbation of costly ointment as anointing Him for His burial, and vouchsafed to lie in the tomb of the wealthy, He seemed plainly to permit us to gratify our feelings by reverence to the departed. These attentions contain, also, a tacit proof of our sense of the immortality of the soul. If the beloved who have gone before us were nothing, we should not have the same pleasure in cherishing these remembrances. We are not half so apt to think too much of the departed, as to forget them too soon; for, if we examine our own minds, we shall find we are never so innocent, so little selfish, so pious, or so charitable, as when under some affliction for the loss of a friend; and these recollections, far from unfitting us for our duty to the living, strengthen us in every good resolution.