What Santa Croce is to Italy, what the Valhalla is to Germany, what the Pantheon was intended to be to France—the shrine of genius—Westminster Abbey is to England. Scores of kings and queens are buried in this National Sanctuary, but though it is still the place for the coronation, it is no longer the place for the interment of royalty. It has become the sepulchre of the kings of great thought and of grand action. Says Dean Stanley in his Historical Memorials of the Abbey, “As the Council of the nation and the Courts of Law have pressed into the Palace of Westminster, and engirdled the very Throne itself, so the ashes of the great citizens of England have pressed into the sepulchre of the Kings and surrounded them as with a guard of honor after their death.... Let those who are inclined to contrast the placid dignity of our recumbent Kings with Chatham gesticulating from the Northern Transept, or Pitt from the western door, or Shakespeare leaning on his column in Poets’ Corner, or Wolfe expiring by the Chapel of St. John, look upon them as in their different ways keeping guard over the shrine of our monarchy and our laws.”
The Abbey does not monopolize the ashes of England’s greatest dead. Many who were illustrious in arms, in arts, in song, in statesmanship, rest in another Valhalla, St. Paul’s Cathedral. Notwithstanding the passionate exclamation of Nelson, “A peerage, or Westminster Abbey,” he was buried in the crypt of St. Paul’s, and so, half a century later, was Wellington. But a mile to the eastward there is a burial place of far more curious interest to the student of English history. It is in the grounds of that gloomy aggregation of buildings, the Tower of London, the fortress, prison, and palace, which dates back to the Norman Conquest. In point of historic reminiscence there is not a more interesting, certainly not a sadder spot than the Chapel of St. Peter in the Tower. Here rest the distinguished victims of the remorseless axe,—Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, Lady Jane Grey, Sir Thomas More, Essex, Somerset, Northumberland, and all the rest of noble martyrs who were beheaded near the Beauchamp Tower, a few yards from where their remains have mouldered to dust. Macaulay says of this burial place: “Death is there associated, not as in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s, with genius and virtue, with public veneration and with imperishable renown; not, as in our humblest churches and church-yards, with everything that is most endearing in social and domestic charities, but with whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny, with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame.”
The Loved and Lost
“The loved and lost!” why do we call them lost?
Because we miss them from our outward road,
God’s unseen angel o’er our pathway crost
Looked on us all, and loving them the most,
Straightway relieved them from life’s weary load.
They are not lost; they are within the door
That shuts out loss and every hurtful thing—