This was a cruel dilemma, for the property had to be repurchased at an enormous advance on the price paid; but it was done, and the terms of the bishop to consecrate the soil, previously declined, were acceded to. These were that the cemetery should become the property of the Church!
The game was thus cleverly won and profitably; the cemetery is fashionable, people pay high prices for being buried in such good company. Every one visits Beckford’s tomb, and the Church, in acquiring the freehold, will be thought by many to have done well for religion. But my mind is of a perverse nature, and is apt to wander. It sometimes comes across the word “infernal,” in relation to things on high, and is sometimes arrested, as by an erratic block, by the word “humbug,” but it would not like to see the two words in juxtaposition in reference to Church doings.
Beckford had desired that his sarcophagus should be placed on the summit of his tower, whence, should he open his eyes again, and be able to see through porphyry, he would behold Fonthill Abbey.
But this pleasure was denied him, and he only lies above the grass instead of below.
On the tomb one reads—
“Eternal Power,
Grant me through obvious clouds one transient glimpse
Of thy bright presence in my dying hour.”
After some weeks at Bath I went to Germany, staying with my daughter, Mrs. Dupré, at Stassfurt, where, underground, had been achieved one of Nature’s most wonderful geological operations. A tidal sea, once extending over many hundred square miles of Prussian Saxony, was gradually blocked out from its connection with the Baltic, and had evaporated, depositing its salts in the order of their solubility, but still replenished at high tide through countless ages, until at last, cut off from its connection with the main waters, it dried up, and during other countless ages became covered two hundred feet deep with soil. The first deposit in this vast bed of salts was common salt (chloride of sodium), a deposit so thick that it has been drilled to a depth of one thousand feet, and not yet pierced through. On the surface of this deposit is found a considerable bed of chloride of potash, with boracic salts, bromides, and others of great commercial value.
Stassfurt is an ancient village some twenty miles from Magdeburg. It has a fine old church, unwittingly founded on a rock of salt, or at least above one; not the same thing as a rock, for the miners have been under the church’s foundations, and the earth has quaked and the walls have been split and shaken, almost to falling. The stork has built its nest upon its tower from time immemorial, and is the sacred bird of Stassfurt.