IN BROMPTON CEMETERY.
‘In Memory of Theodore. Died November the 20th, 18—, aged three years,’ I am not going to tell you about the tragedy this little life represented, and how much suffering and how many tears lie buried with my darling. I put all that away—all useless regrets, all vain repining, when I laid him under two great pine-trees, looking straight to the south, where the morning sun peeps earliest in faint yellow streaks, and the broad arms of the firs are ever held lovingly over the little head, and shelter away alike the drifting snow and summer heat—where the thrushes and blackbirds sing their matins and vespers. They and the pink chaffinches, and bold-eyed sparrows, come half-timidly, half-hardily, with their little shy feet, close to mine, where I sit alone by my lamb—Rachel weeping for her dead.
As time, God’s true physician, softened my grief, and yet drew me to spend many hours where all was buried that could have pieced together a broken life and broken heart, I became gradually interested in the great company of the dead lying round, and anxious to learn some word of the lives and histories, even of those whose birth and death-date make up all the world shall ever write of them.
Right and left of my baby lie an old man and a young girl; he, a wealthy, honoured merchant, who had lived ninety years of prosperous and successful existence. His tomb is of gray marble; the letters are cut well and deeply; all its cold grandeur is perfectly kept up in unsurpassed cleanliness and order; but no one ever comes to put a flower on his grave. The other grave, young Bessie’s, is also neglected, though in a different way. The letters are fading fast from the crooked headstone; and the ivy that has crept round it is so tangled, that before long the little tomb will be quite covered. Bessie was sixteen years old, and went to her rest in the glowing July of 1851, when the fairy palace of Hyde Park, sparkling in its glory, promised, but did not fulfil, the commencement of a long reign of peace and good-will to all the nations of the earth. Where are now those, I wonder, who left Bessie here!
Hard by lies many a different life from the maid’s and the merchant’s. Brompton is essentially a military cemetery, where sleep the veterans of the Peninsula, the Crimea, and India, and the Cape. Truly, when the last réveille sounds, no more gallant hearts shall answer to the call than our dead English soldiers.
Close to my baby are Sir John Garvock and Sir James Anderson, the last under a pyramid of cannon-balls; and on this February day, warm and breezy, with flying rain-clouds, driving off the fogs that for days past have hovered like unclean birds over London, there comes a wail of fifes and muffled drums. The trees are dripping with water, the grass is sodden, but through its muddy surface, here and there, are peeping green blades—fresh promises of spring. Shrill over the long damp walks under the yews comes the Adeste Fideles. It is ‘a soldier’s funeral,’ the gardener tells me—two Guardsmen from the Tower, who were drowned last week, having fallen into the river in the fog. The procession winds slowly into view—the muffled drums, the gay uniforms, the coffins, each covered with a black and white pall, and heaped with wreaths. On each coffin lie the dead man’s bayonet and shako. The chaplain commits earth to earth; and the volleys flash over our brothers departed, and with cheery strains the band is back again into the world.
Next in number to the soldiers lie the actors, with whom Brompton has ever been a favourite burying-ground. Here is one of the greatest actresses of our day, Adelaide Neilson, whose ‘glorious eyes’ closed—for us—too soon; for her, just as a first gleam of happiness and repose was dawning upon a stormy, clouded life. The ‘beautiful gifted’ is ‘resting’ under a tall hewn cross of roughened marble. The noble head of Mellon the composer, conspicuously placed, looks out upon us from a grove where lie Nellie Moore, the ‘Lancashire lass;’ T. P. Cooke, the sailor-actor; Keeley, Leigh Murray, and Planché, whose coffin may be seen through the iron gates of the catacombs. Albert Smith is here too. Near Mellon rests a lady whose story and recollections must have been interesting—one Sarah Agnes, who died in 1846, ‘widow of General Count Demetrius de Wints, elected Prince of Montenegro on the 1st of August 1795.’ I know nothing of this page of the history of Montenegro; but for Sarah Agnes, it was, as Bismarck said of the election of young Battenberg, ‘something to be remembered.’
Sydney Lady Morgan is here too, and makes us think of the Wild Irish Girl, with her harp and green fan and mode cloak, her quarrels with her publishers, and her endless vanities, from the concealment of her age, to the blue satin gown which made her ‘the best dressed woman in the room;’ her ceaseless tormentings of the staid sensible husband, who won her so hardly and loved her so patiently. One wonders if that unquiet spirit sleeps soundly, and why her novels—novels that brought the Dublin actor’s daughter from obscurity to be a leader of the fashion she loved so dearly—should now be hardly remembered even by the fact, that one beguiled the last hours of Pitt.
Jackson the pugilist, whose tomb by Baily, with its couching lion, is one of the most conspicuous objects here, represents a science that is now moribund. Near him is the humble grave of one of the sextons of the cemetery, who a year or two ago was crushed by the falling-in of the warm yellow gravel of the grave he was digging.