The fence across our road, of which she opens the gate, is of open-work, iron, plain paling, and encloses one side of the churchyard of which Gray wrote:—
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell forever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
It is an enclosure of perhaps two acres, and simply fenced in from a large grazing-field. The place is by no means solitary in appearance, though no house save the cottage is near it, or in near view, for it is out in the full sunlight, and has for company and suburbs, fine groves, lawns, distant hills, and every accompaniment of good rural character. As Whittier says of our New England burial-grounds,—
With flowers or snowflakes for its sod,
Around the seasons ran,
And evermore the love of God
Rebuked the fear of man.
The ground inside has a very clean and well-kept, though not especially ancient look. There are many gravestones, and but few monuments. A wide modern path, or carriage-way, leads from the gate to the church itself. The latter, which is perhaps 500 feet from the gate, has a very ancient look. It is low, and built of small flintstones. The roof is very high and presents two gable-ends, with a large Gothic window in each; at the other end two gables are also shown, with one some higher than the other. The tower is at the extreme right of the building, up at the farther end, and outside of and against the high part before named. It is square, quite large for its height, having a battlement around the top, and every part of it is so covered with ivy as to expose no portion of the stonework to view. The spire above this is very clean, and of a whitish stone. A large portion of the church itself is covered, or mantled, as Gray expressed it, with ivy; and it may here be added that the ivy is of the common, dark, substantial-leaved kind that we so commonly cultivate in pots, or, in the warmer parts of our country, on the outside of buildings. Who can stand in this place, gazing on this ancient church as the poet Gray many a time did, and not think of that terse and expressive line of the great poem, where he speaks of the quietness of the evening:—
And all the air a solemn stillness holds.
The famed "yew-tree's shade" is here, for at our left, as we pass up the great path, or driveway, and near the end of the church which is on our right, with little more than the path named between it and the great tree, the latter stands sentinel-like, as it has stood for a century,—its dark, sombre, fanlike horizontal branches reaching almost to the ground, and throwing pall-like shadows over our way. The side walls of the enclosure on two sides, and near the church, are of brick, and their tops and parts of their sides are grandly covered with ivy; and to the right, in the adjoining lot, are trees and thick shrubbery; and we are again reminded of Whittier, where he says of one of our country burial-grounds:—
Without the wall a birch-tree shows
Its drooped and tasseled head;