The chill of April winds does not prevent the greenness of herbage which the fecundating power of April rains provokes. And hidden in among the relics of last year’s vegetation, and the nascent herbage of young spring, little flowers had nestled away; little, but beautiful flowers, decorating the narrow space between the new-born child and the dead parent. I plucked a few of those modest gems, almost afraid that I desecrated the altar of Nature, in thus taking its scanty decorations; but they did their office, since they awakened in me a remembrance of Him whose hand planted the towering oak that makes the forest majestic, and whose fingers scattered the seed that produced these minute ministers of his will, these records of his omnipotence and omnipresence.
“All things are full of God”—it is the language of the heathen poet, it is the language of divine inspiration, it is the language of the heart touched with the truths of Nature, and connecting them with Nature’s Author. “Hill and dale are of thy dressing.” And as I stood in the dale, amid the delicate outpouring of the beauties there, and looked upward to the hills studded with the time-marked trees, I said to myself, “Here is that volume of truth that speaks of the unknown, yet not unreverenced, God, whose will and providence are revealed in the volume of inspiration.”
I had, almost insensibly, got within the enclosure of a burying-ground, which is situated near the Frankford Road, only a few miles from the city, and was transferring my thoughts from the beautiful objects of Nature to the specimens of human ingenuity that transmit the date of birth and death, with the name of the mortal, from one generation to the other. No one, I believe, passes through a burying-ground without pausing to read the little story, and thinking over the events which marked the life of the deceased. It is good when standing thus to think that he who is below was of like passions with ourselves—that he had all the social and domestic feelings which we possess, and was influenced by the events of life as we are. What a world do we animate when we thus think of each individual—thus place him in connection with social, domestic, political life. How we multiply interests, augment joys, and increase the pangs to which human existence is liable.
At the turning of one of the little avenues that “lead to the tomb,” making an easy path to the grave, I saw that a new head-stone had been erected, and it bore the name of one whom I had known in her childhood. She was beautiful—but more lovely in mind than person. She married early, and gave birth to an infant, and died—a short biography. She was not forgotten. The memorials testified to the yet existing memory of her husband—and a nurse leading a little child toward the mound signified that her virtues were to be kept in remembrance by the child she had borne.
A little flower had sprung up on the very top of the grave. It had probably been planted in the autumn, but it was now beautiful in its solitude. Its colors were as rich as if the roots had struck down and drawn nutriment from the heart that mouldered below, and its odors were as rich as if they were imparted by the spirit that had gone upward. I know not when I have seen thus placed a more lovely flower; perhaps it owed a part of this estimate to its loneliness, a part to its connection with the beauty and purity of her over whom it expanded.
The little child on leaning over the grave fell prostrate, and manifested no disposition to rise. After a few moments delay, I gently raised her in my arms, and placed her on her feet. She seemed not pleased at first with my interference.
“It is my mamma’s grave,” said she, with much emphasis, “and she is down there now.”
“But lying on that moist ground might expose you to take cold.”
“Yet I love to throw myself there,” she said. “I must do it, for I loved her much.”
I tried to persuade her to desist, but she stepped toward the grave with a view of repeating her fall. Her attendant stooped down, and said in a low voice,