Delphi Complete Works of William Wordsworth

by William Wordsworth

  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