Affection would often visit this Land of the Dead; the widow would take her children by the hand, and lead them into the country, to shew them the little freehold in which their father slept. The poor would become more pious, and amid their troubles thank God that they had at last a tranquil haven, in which they could for ever moor their storm-tossed barques: to them suburban cemeteries would become spots filled with solemn associations—homes to which they were fast hastening with patient resignation.
To us there is no feeling of loneliness while wandering through a beautiful cemetery. The dead seem to belong to us; they are of our company; they have but taken their berths in the great ship, and are sleeping until we come to join them, to be fellow-voyagers with them into the unknown sea of eternity—trusting ourselves to the care of the same Almighty Captain whose “ministering angels” fill the sails. Around the cemetery we see the wide unwalled country, where we have so often walked and talked with those who now “sleep their long sleep,” and, while gazing over the landscape, they seem to accompany us, and to live again in our thoughts; or we stand, as it were, in a great picture-gallery, surrounded with portraits of the dead: not a single object rises up to shock our feelings;—the open country beyond—the trees around—the flowers that cover the graves by which we stand—cause us to contemplate death kindly, and, instead of becoming hideous, he is but a gentle porter, who sits patiently without the gates of heaven, and welcomes all who are prepared to enter.
To plant a grave with such flowers as “the poor inhabitant below” loved whilst living, is a pious pleasure: it is a living link between us and the dead, and keeps alive an affection which belongs not to the world; though a “poor thing, it is our own;” for we know that the flowers are kept alive by an invisible hand, that in the still dark night they continue to grow, while we are wrapt in as sound a slumber as that which falls upon the dead—the only difference being that we perchance may again awaken. There is no such link between us and them in a cold, grey, hard, dead tomb-stone: the tears which fall upon the flowers are not lost, for we know not but that the perfume may be wafted to heaven.
We believe that the dead will again arise—that in some other state we shall again meet with them; and yet there are those who make their remains a source of profit. Perchance, the Angel of Death holds his court beyond the grave, and they may be summoned before him to account for their deeds. We, in our boyish days, were taught to take off our hats when we entered a churchyard, and to walk amongst the dead as reverentially as we did up the aisle of the church—to look upon the grave as the gate which opened into heaven, as the only road which leads to the realms of eternal happiness.
I have, in the work formerly alluded to, endeavoured to paint an ancient funeral procession, from the pages of holy writ, and to shew how great was the respect paid to the dead in the patriarchal ages. Through what a laud of poetry and peril was the dead body of Joseph brought out of Egypt! We marvel that no painter has been bold enough to grapple with so sublime a subject. Amid the plagues that struck consternation into the hearts of the old Egyptians, there stood the coffin ready to be borne away: in the deep darkness which overshadowed the land—it stood black and silent amid the deep gloom. When the Israelites departed they bore it away: the pillar of fire flashed redly upon it by night, and by day it was slowly carried behind the pillar of cloud: through the Red Sea it was borne; below that high and terrible wall of water did the body of that dead man pass; then the sleeping billows rolled back, and there the haughty Egyptians found a grave. Through storm and battle, and the perils of the wilderness, and the thunder which shook Mount Sinai, was the body of Joseph carried; and when Moses held up his wearied arm and conquered Amalek, it was still there. On the waves of war it was at last washed to the Promised Land; it followed the Ark of God when Jordan was divided, and was at length buried in the field of Shechem, in the ground which Jacob had long before purchased of the sons of Hamor. In the whole annals of time, there is no funeral procession that in sublimity and grandeur approaches his, who when young was sold as a slave to the Egyptians. That dead-march through the God-dried ocean, and over the desert, led by Moses—the man who had spoken to his Maker, and who was a mourner at that solemn funeral—causes the eye to quiver beneath its gloomy and awful grandeur: we see the dead and the living pass away amid the roar of the ocean, the thunder of the Mount, and the clashing of battle upon battle; and while we read, we feel as if we stood trembling in the presence of God.
I will not break the chain of the reader’s thoughts while pondering over this great and grand funeral procession, by pointing to the desecration of the dead in the present day, further than stating that the revolting and impious evil can only be remedied by suburban cemeteries; for around such places there reigns a silence in keeping with the solemnity of death: there no jarring sounds fall upon the ear, for the lulling murmur made by the leaves is in keeping with the repose of the dead. Flowers planted upon a grave seem like sacred objects; in our minds they somehow appear to belong to the dead, as if hallowed by the soil in which they have grown. There are numberless passages in our old poets abounding with descriptions of flowers which were dedicated to the dead; and we may, in some future work, return to the subject, and string together a garland of funeral emblems; for
“Methinks the flowers
Have spirits far more beautiful than ours.”—Withers.
The gentle hearts of the old poets clung to the flowers with a fond affection; in their eyes they were sweet messengers, bearing meanings and thoughts “too deep for tears,” ever hinting of love which dieth not, but liveth on for ever in another state of existence. They traced in the flowers fanciful resemblances of fond passions—likenesses of what they loved and cherished all the more since the original forms which they fancied the flowers resembled were transplanted into the gardens of heaven.
We who sojourned during the whole of that summer in the very heart of the district which suffered the most severely during that calamitous visitation, almost unconsciously gathered materials for one of those gloomy pictures which so few living witnesses survive to paint, and which we hope may never again darken our pages. We seem like those who, having escaped some perilous shipwreck, sit shuddering on the rock on which they have been thrown, their faces buried in their hands, yet unable to shut out the appalling spectacle they beheld, even after it passed away. Fancy still calls up the phantoms, amid the white foam and the tumbling waves, as they float by, with pale faces, uplifted and beseeching hands; youth and beauty with her long hair unbound, and crisped with the boiling spray, while manly vigour buffets in vain with the billows, until darkness and destruction sweep over all; and we, like the mournful messenger in Job, “only escaped alone to tell thee.”
The Land of Death in which we dwelt was Newington, hemmed in by Lambeth, Southwark, Bermondsey, and other gloomy parishes through which the pestilence stalked like a Destroying Angel in the deep shadows of the night and the open noon of day, while in every street