(FIRST VERSE.)
"Calm be her slumbers near kindred are sighing,
A husband deplores in deep anguish of heart,
Beneath the cold earth unconsciously lying,
No murmur can reach her, no tempest can start."
(SECOND VERSE.)
"Calm be her sleep as the silence of even
When hearts unto deep invocation give birth.
With a prayer she has knelt at the portal of heaven
And found the admission she hoped for on earth_."
Not to speak of the "poetry" just here, how charmingly consistent with each other are the ideas contained in the passages I have italicized! In the first verse, you observe, the inmate is sleeping unconscious beneath the ground: in the second verse, she has ascended to heaven and found admittance to mansions in the skies!—A similar confusion and contradiction of ideas occur in most of the epitaphs I see. Does our theology furnish us with no clear conception of the state of the soul after death? The Catholic Church teaches that the spirit at death descends into the interior of the earth to a place called Hades, where it is detained until the day of judgment, when it is reunited with the dust of the body, and ascends to a heaven in the sky. This doctrine has the merit of being positive, clear, and comprehensible, and, consequently, whenever expressed, it always means something exact and well-defined. Has the Protestant Church equally definite notions on the subject, or, in fact, any fixed opinions respecting it whatever? If not, why, as a matter of good taste, for no weightier reason, in records almost imperishable like these, leave the matter alone! Silence is better than nonsense. Suppose a few thousand years hence our civilization to have become extinct, and that some antiquary from the antipodes should visit this desolate hill to excavate, like Layard at Nineveh, for relics of the old Americans. Suppose, having collected a ship-load of broken tombstones, he should forward them to the Polynesian Museum, and set the savans of the age at work deciphering their inscriptions, what sense would be made out of these epitaphs? How would they interpret our notions of a future state? Taking our own monuments, cut with our own hands, inscribed with our own signs-manual, what would they infer our system of religion to have been? If the Egyptians were as vague and careless as we in this matter, our archaeologists must have made some amusing blunders.
Here are two epitaphs which suggest something else:—
No. I.
"I loved him in his beauty,
A mother boy while here,
I knew he was an angel bright
Formed for another sphere."
No. II.
"Farewell my wife and children dear
God calls you home to rest.
Still Angels wisper in my ear
We'll meet in heavenly bliss."