The sensation produced throughout the community by the loss of so illustrious a naval commander was shown in the faces of the crowd. Despite the cold weather, the people lined the streets to see and listen and feel. The tolling of the church bells, and the boom of the minute guns rolling up from the ships and yard of the naval station, added solemnity to the scene.
Within the church, the burial service was conducted by the Rev. Drs. Hawks, Vinton, Higbee, and Montgomery. The anthem “Lord let me know my end,” the hymn “I would not live alway,” and the interlude “I heard a voice from Heaven,” were sung, moving all hearts by their sweetness and solemnity.
The service over, the coffin was carried out and deposited in the grave in the church-yard adjoining, and lowered into its last resting place. The committal service and prayer over, the marines fired the three volleys of musketry. The weather-beaten tars of the Japan Expedition took a last look at the wooden enclosure which contained all that was mortal of their beloved Commander, and all turned to depart. “The sight of those honest hardy marines, who had collected from all quarters, and at great personal inconvenience, to pay this last tribute of respect and affection to one whom they had once loved to obey, was interesting and suggestive. One almost expected to witness a repetition of the scene that occurred at the funeral of Lord Nelson, and to see the stars and stripes that floated above the grave torn into shreds and kept as momentoes of the man and the occasion; but their affection though deep and strong did not run into the poetical, and the flag remained whole and untouched.”
In the church of St. Nazaro in Florence, may be read upon the tomb of a soldier the words:
“Johannes Divultius, who never rested, rests—Hush!”
That is Perry’s real epitaph.
The unresting one now rests in the Isle of Peace. The two brothers, Perry of the Lakes, and Perry of Japan, sleep in God, near the beloved mother on whose bosom they first learned the worth of life, whose memory they worshipped throughout their careers, and beside whose relics they wished to lie.
On a hill in the beautiful Island cemetery at Newport, which overlooks aboriginal Aquidneck, the City and Isle of Peace, the writer found on a visit, October 30th, the family burying-ground. In the soft October sunlight, the sight compelled contrast to the ancestral God’s acre in South Kingston, among whose lichened stones of unwrought granite the Commodore proposed erecting a fitting monument to his fathers. Within the evergreen hedge, in the grassy circle ringed with granite and iron lay, on the north side, the tomb of the Commodore’s grand-daughter, a lovely maiden upon whose grave fresh flowers are laid yearly by the loving parent’s hands.
The tomb of M. C. Perry is of marble, on a granite base, with six garlands of oak leaves chiselled on it and bearing the modest inscription:
“Erected by his widow to the memory of Matthew Calbraith Perry, Commodore in the United States Navy, Born April 19th, 1794. Died March the 4th, 1858.”