custom proceeded obviously from a twofold desire: first to guard
the remains of the deceased from irreverent approach or from
savage violation: and secondly to preserve their memory. “Never
any,” says Camden, “neglected burial but some savage nations; as
the Bactrians, which cast their dead to the dogs; some varlet
philosophers, as Diogenes, who desired to be devoured of fishes;
some dissolute courtiers, as Maecenas, who was wont to say, Non
tumulum curo; sepelit natura relictos.
‘I’m careless of a grave:—Nature her dead will save.’“
As soon as nations had learned the use of letters, epitaphs were
inscribed upon these monuments; in order that their intention
might be more surely and adequately fulfilled. I have derived
monuments and epitaphs from two sources of feeling, but these do
in fact resolve themselves into one. The invention of epitaphs,
Weever, in his Discourse of Funeral Monuments, says rightly,
“proceeded from the presage or fore-feeling of immortality,
implanted in all men naturally, and is referred to the scholars of
Linus the Theban poet, who flourished about the year of the world
two thousand seven hundred; who first bewailed this Linus their
Master, when he was slain, in doleful verses, then called of him
Oelina, afterwards Epitaphia, for that they were first sung at
burials, after engraved upon the sepulchres.”
And, verily, without the consciousness of a principle of
immortality in the human soul, Man could never have had awakened
in him the desire to live in the remembrance of his fellows: mere
love, or the yearning of kind towards kind, could not have
produced it. The dog or horse perishes in the field, or in the
stall, by the side of his companions, and is incapable of
anticipating the sorrow with which his surrounding associates
shall bemoan his death, or pine for his loss; he cannot pre-
conceive this regret, he can form no thought of it; and therefore
cannot possibly have a desire to leave such regret or remembrance
behind him. Add to the principle of love which exists in the
inferior animals, the faculty of reason which exists in Man alone;
will the conjunction of these account for the desire? Doubtless it
is a necessary consequence of this conjunction; yet not, I think,
as a direct result, but only to be come at through an intermediate
thought, viz. that of an intimation or assurance within us, that
some part of our nature is imperishable. At least the precedence,
in order of birth, of one feeling to the other, is unquestionable.
If we look back upon the days of childhood, we shall find that the
time is not in remembrance when, with respect to our own
individual Being, the mind was without this assurance; whereas,
the wish to be remembered by our friends or kindred after death,
or even in absence, is, as we shall discover, a sensation that
does not form itself till the ‘social’ feelings have been
developed, and the Reason has connected itself with a wide range
of objects. Forlorn, and cut off from communication with the best
part of his nature, must that man be, who should derive the sense
of immortality, as it exists in the mind of a child, from the same
unthinking gaiety or liveliness of animal spirits with which the
lamb in the meadow or any other irrational creature is endowed;
who should ascribe it, in short, to blank ignorance in the child;
to an inability arising from the imperfect state of his faculties
to come, in any point of his being, into contact with a notion of
death; or to an unreflecting acquiescence in what has been
instilled into him! Has such an unfolder of the mysteries of
nature, though he may have forgotten his former self, ever noticed
the early, obstinate, and unappeasable inquisitiveness of children
upon the subject of origination? This single fact proves outwardly
the monstrousness of those suppositions: for, if we had no direct
external testimony that the minds of very young children meditate
feelingly upon death and immortality, these inquiries, which we
all know they are perpetually making concerning the ‘whence’, do
necessarily include correspondent habits of interrogation
concerning the ‘whither’. Origin and tendency are notions
inseparably co-relative. Never did a child stand by the side of a
running stream, pondering within himself what power was the feeder
of the perpetual current, from what never-wearied sources the body
of water was supplied, but he must have been inevitably propelled
to follow this question by another: “Towards what abyss is it in
progress? what receptacle can contain the mighty influx?” And the
spirit of the answer must have been, though the word might be sea
or ocean, accompanied perhaps with an image gathered from a map,
or from the real object in nature—these might have been the
‘letter’, but the ‘spirit’ of the answer must have been ‘as’
inevitably,—a receptacle without bounds or dimensions;—nothing
less than infinity. We may, then, be justified in asserting, that
the sense of immortality, if not a co-existent and twin birth with
Reason, is among the earliest of her offspring: and we may further
assert, that from these conjoined, and under their countenance,
the human affections are gradually formed and opened out. This is
not the place to enter into the recesses of these investigations;
but the subject requires me here to make a plain avowal, that, for
my own part, it is to me inconceivable, that the sympathies of
love towards each other, which grow with our growth, could ever
attain any new strength, or even preserve the old, after we had
received from the outward senses the impression of death, and were
in the habit of having that impression daily renewed and its
accompanying feeling brought home to ourselves, and to those we
love; if the same were not counteracted by those communications
with our internal Being, which are anterior to all these
experiences, and with which revelation coincides, and has through
that coincidence alone (for otherwise it could not possess it) a
power to affect us. I confess, with me the conviction is absolute
that, if the impression and sense of death were not thus
counterbalanced, such a hollowness would pervade the whole system
of things, such a want of correspondence and consistency, a
disproportion so astounding betwixt means and ends, that there
could be no repose, no joy. Were we to grow up unfostered by this
genial warmth, a frost would chill the spirit, so penetrating and
powerful that there could be no motions of the life of love; and
infinitely less could we have any wish to be remembered after we
had passed away from a world in which each man had moved about
like a shadow.—If, then, in a creature endowed with the faculties
of foresight and reason, the social affections could not have
unfolded themselves uncountenanced by the faith that Man is an
immortal being, and if, consequently, neither could the individual
dying
have had a desire to survive in the remembrance of his
fellows, nor on their side could they have felt a wish to preserve
for future times vestiges of the departed; it follows, as a final
inference, that without the belief in immortality, wherein these
several desires originate, neither monuments nor epitaphs, in
affectionate or laudatory commemoration of the deceased, could
have existed in the world.
Simonides, it is related, upon landing in a strange country,
found the corse of an unknown person lying by the seaside; he
buried it, and was honoured throughout Greece for the piety of
that act. Another ancient Philosopher, chancing to fix his eyes
upon a dead body, regarded the same with slight, if not with
contempt, saying, “See the shell of the flown bird!” But it is not
to be supposed that the moral and tender-hearted Simonides was
incapable of the lofty movements of thought to which that other
Sage gave way at the moment while his soul was intent only upon
the indestructible being; nor, on the other hand, that he, in
whose sight a lifeless human body was of no more value than the
worthless shell from which the living fowl had departed, would
not, in a different mood of mind, have been affected by those
earthly considerations which had incited the philosophic Poet to
the performance of that pious duty. And with regard to this latter
we may be assured that, if he had been destitute of the capability
of communing with the more exalted thoughts that appertain to
human nature, he would have cared no more for the corse of the
stranger than for the dead body of a seal or porpoise which might
have been cast up by the waves. We respect the corporeal frame of
Man, not merely because it is the habitation of a rational, but of
an immortal Soul. Each of these Sages was in sympathy with the
best feelings of our nature; feelings which, though they seem
opposite to each other, have another and a finer connection than
that of contrast.—It is a connection formed through the subtle
progress by which, both in the natural and the moral world,
qualities pass insensibly into their contraries, and things
revolve upon each other. As, in sailing upon the orb of this
planet, a voyage towards the regions where the sun sets conducts
gradually to the quarter where we have been accustomed to behold
it come forth at its rising; and, in like manner, a voyage towards
the east, the birth-place in our imagination of the morning, leads
finally to the quarter where the sun is last seen when he departs
from our eyes; so the contemplative Soul, travelling in the
direction of mortality, advances to the country of everlasting
life; and, in like manner, may she continue to explore those
cheerful tracts till she is brought back, for her advantage and
benefit, to the land of transitory things—of sorrow and of tears.
On a midway point, therefore, which commands the thoughts and
feelings of the two Sages whom we have represented in contrast,
does the Author of that species of composition, the laws of which
it is our present purpose to explain, take his stand. Accordingly,
recurring to the twofold desire of guarding the remains of the
deceased and preserving their memory, it may be said that a
sepulchral monument is a tribute to a man as a human being; and
that an epitaph (in the ordinary meaning attached to the word)
includes this general feeling and something more; and is a record
to preserve the memory of the dead, as a tribute due to his
individual worth, for a satisfaction to the sorrowing hearts of
the survivors, and for the common benefit of the living: which
record is to be accomplished, not in a general manner, but, where
it can, in ‘close connection with the bodily remains of the
deceased’: and these, it may be added, among the modern nations of
Europe, are deposited within, or contiguous to, their places of
worship. In ancient times, as is well known, it was the custom to
bury the dead beyond the walls of towns and cities; and among the
Greeks and Romans they were frequently interred by the waysides.
I could here pause with pleasure, and invite the Reader to
indulge with me in contemplation of the advantages which must have
attended such a practice. We might ruminate upon the beauty which
the monuments, thus placed, must have borrowed from the
surrounding images of nature—from the trees, the wild flowers,
from a stream running perhaps within sight or hearing, from the
beaten road stretching its weary length hard by. Many tender
similitudes must these objects have presented to the mind of the
traveller leaning upon one of the tombs, or reposing in the
coolness of its shade, whether he had halted from weariness or in
compliance with the invitation, “Pause, Traveller!” so often found
upon the monuments. And to its epitaph also must have been
supplied strong appeals to visible appearances or immediate
impressions, lively and affecting analogies of life as a journey—
death as a sleep overcoming the tired wayfarer—of misfortune as a
storm that falls suddenly upon him—of beauty as a flower that
passeth away, or of innocent pleasure as one that may be gathered-
-of virtue that standeth firm as a rock against the beating waves-
-of hope “undermined insensibly like the poplar by the side of the
river that has fed it,” or blasted in a moment like a pine-tree by
the stroke of lightning upon the mountain-top—of admonitions and
heart-stirring remembrances, like a refreshing breeze that comes
without warning, or the taste of the waters of an unexpected
fountain. These and similar suggestions must have given, formerly,
to the language of the senseless stone a voice enforced and
endeared by the benignity of that nature with which it was in
unison.—We, in modern times, have lost much of these advantages;
and they are but in a small degree counterbalanced to the
inhabitants of large towns and cities by the custom of depositing
the dead within, or contiguous to, their places of worship;
however splendid or imposing may be the appearance of those
edifices, or however interesting or salutary the recollections
associated with them. Even were it not true that tombs lose their
monitory virtue when thus obtruded upon the notice of men occupied
with the cares of the world, and too often sullied and defiled by
those cares, yet still, when death is in our thoughts, nothing can
make amends for the want of the soothing influences of nature, and
for the absence of those types of renovation and decay which the
fields and woods offer to the notice of the serious and
contemplative mind. To feel the force of this sentiment, let a man
only compare in imagination the unsightly manner in which our
monuments are crowded together in the busy, noisy, unclean, and
almost grassless churchyard of a large town, with the still
seclusion of a Turkish cemetery, in some remote place, and yet
further sanctified by the grove of cypress in which it is
embosomed. Thoughts in the same temper as these have already been
expressed with true sensibility by an ingenuous Poet of the
present day. The subject of his poem is “All Saints Church,
Derby:” he has been deploring the forbidding and unseemly
appearance of its burial-ground, and uttering a wish that in past
times the practice had been adopted of interring the inhabitants
of large towns in the country;—
Then in some rural, calm, sequestered spot
Where healing Nature her benignant look
Ne’er changes, save at that lorn season, when,
With tresses drooping o’er her sable stole,
She yearly mourns the mortal doom of man,
Her noblest work, (so Israel’s virgins erst,
With annual moan upon the mountains wept
Their fairest gone,) there in that rural scene,
So placid, so congenial to the wish
The Christian feels, of peaceful rest within
The silent grave, I would have stayed:
*****
—wandered forth, where the cold dew of heaven
Lay on the humbler graves around, what time
The pale moon gazed upon the turfy mounds,
Pensive, as though like me, in lonely muse,
‘Twere brooding on the dead inhumed beneath.
There while with him, the holy man of Uz,
O’er human destiny I sympathised,
Counting the long, long periods prophecy
Decrees to roll, ere the great day arrives
Of resurrection, oft the blue-eyed Spring
Had met me with her blossoms, as the Dove,
Of old, returned with olive leaf, to cheer
The Patriarch mourning o’er a world destroyed:
And I would bless her visit; for to me
‘Tis sweet to trace the consonance that links
As one, the works of Nature and the word
Of God.—JOHN EDWARDS.
A village churchyard, lying as it does in the lap of nature, may
indeed be most favourably contrasted with that of a town of
crowded population; and sepulture therein combines many of the
best tendencies which belong to the mode practised by the Ancients
with others peculiar to itself. The sensations of pious
cheerfulness, which attend the celebration of the sabbath-day in
rural places, are profitably chastised by the sight of the graves
of kindred and friends, gathered together in that general home
towards which the thoughtful yet happy spectators themselves are
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