From a photo by Mr. T. W. Woodruffe
When the vicar of the parish arrived, in the year 1836, he brought with him, among other carved oak furniture, a bedstead of Spanish chestnut, inlaid and adorned with ancient veneer: and it was set up, unwittingly, in a room of the vicarage which looked out upon the tombs. In the right-hand panel of the framework, at the head, was grooved in the name of John Manning; and in the place of the wife, the left hand, Christiana Manning, with their marriage date between. Nor was it discovered until afterwards that this was the very couch of wedded benediction, a relic of the great Stanbury marriage, which had been brought back and set up within sight of the unconscious grave; and thus that the sole surviving records of the bridegroom and the bride stood side by side, the bedstead and the tomb, the first and the last scene of their early hope and their final rest.
Another and a lowlier grave bears on its recording-stone a broken snatch of antique rhythm, interwoven with modern verse. A young man[30] of this rural people, when he lay a-dying, found solace in his intervals of pain in the remembered echo of, it may be, some long-forgotten dirge; and he desired that the words which so haunted his memory might somehow or other be engraved on his stone. He died, and his parish priest fulfilled his desire by causing the following death-verse to be set up where he lies. We shall close our legends of Morwenstow with these simple lines.[31] The fragment which clung to the dying man’s memory was the first only of these lines:—
“‘Sing! from the chamber to the grave!’
Thus did the dead man say,—
‘A sound of melody I crave
Upon my burial-day.
‘Bring forth some tuneful instrument,
And let your voices rise:
My spirit listened as it went
To music of the skies!
‘Sing sweetly while you travel on,
And keep the funeral slow:
The angels sing where I am gone;
And you should sing below!
‘Sing from the threshold to the porch,
Until you hear the bell;
And sing you loudly in the church
The Psalms I love so well.
‘Then bear me gently to my grave:
And as you pass along,
Remember, ’twas my wish to have
A pleasant funeral-song!
‘So earth to earth—and dust to dust—
And though my bones decay,
My soul shall sing among the just,
Until the Judgment-day?’”