CHAP. XVIII.

ON THE MEANS OF COMMEMORATING THE DEAD.

Friends, brothers, and sisters, are laid side by side,
Yet none have saluted, and none have replied.
Ah! sweetly they slumber, nor hope, love, or fear;
Peace, peace is the watchword—the only one here.

KEATES.

How keenly do all men of intellect and feeling desire to visit the birth-place, and still more the burial-place of the illustrious dead! The tomb of Virgil appears to give a material reality to his name; and when standing beside the grave of Shakspeare we seem to be brought more nearly into association with his spirit. Only a few handfuls of dust then divide us from his remains, and we read almost with a feeling of companionship his own strange epitaph on himself, which has so often deterred his admirers from disturbing his last resting-place, and will probably secure their being left in sacred repose till the last awful hour of this perishable globe.

Good friend! for Jesus' sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here:

Blest be the man that spares these stones,
And curs'd be he that moves my bones.

"The grave! the grave! it buries every error, it covers every defect; from its peaceful bosom spring none but fond regrets and tender recollections. Who can look down upon the grave, even of an enemy, and not feel a compunctious throb that he should ever have warred with the poor handful of earth that lies mouldering there ?”*

In "burying our dead out of our sight,” as the patriarch Abraham so pathetically expresses it, a solemn and tender feeling of respect seems natural to all; therefore it is supposed, when our Divine Saviour replied to the young man who wished to bury his father, "Let the dead bury their dead," that the parent was aged and infirm, requiring probably years of care, not as people generally imagine, already dead, and his corpse laid out to be interred, so that the convert was not asking a short leave of absence to perform a sacred duty, but making a pretext for postponing his obedience to an indefinite period.

Nothing is more extraordinary than to observe how differently a reverence for the dead is testified in various periods and by various nations. The heathens, who had no expectations beyond this world, used merely to bury their friends at night, and to make the scene more dismal, hired mourners, to rend the air by "irrational wailings and frantic shrieks." In some countries the body

* Washington Irving.

is carefully embalmed, in others consumed by fire; but the Parsees at Bombay suspend the dead on high, for the birds to devour, and consider that thus they are honoured.

The French, with characteristic sentimentalism, have cimetières ornés à la pittoresque! a fashion rapidly introducing itself in Britain, where every device that good taste or the most trumpery caprice can dictate is lavishly displayed with a profusion of panegyrical inscriptions, which might well account for the simple question of an astonished child, after spelling over the epitaphs in a burying-place, of the meritorious dead, "Where are the bad people buried?"

See stately tombs, see dim sepulchral pomp,
And monumental falsehoods, piled o'er men
Whose only worth is in their epitaphs.

R. MONTGOMERY.

The Jews always formerly interred the deceased without the city, and now, so thoroughly are they convinced of a coming resurrection, that the name they give to a burial-place is, "The House of the Living,” implying that the dead only can be said to have attained to actual life.

The Affghauns, having the universal expectation of being restored to existence, call their cemeteries "The City of the Silent;" and the Moravians name theirs "God's Ground." It has been truly remarked, that a burying-place is "the

field of God, sown with the seeds of the resurrection;" but the Quakers, at their funerals, allow no consecration of the ground, no mourning, no service — the body is laid down in their meetinghouse, while they all wait to see whether any one be inclined to speak; afterwards it is rested for a similar purpose on the edge of the grave, and at last, the bearers, 'silently laying it in the great gulf of mankind, retire, moving away as noiselessly as they came. No pompous panegyric is permitted over those in death, who in life looked not for the praise of men, therefore are their tombstones also silent. In allusion to these customs, the following appropriate lines are written by Bernard Barton, the only Quaker poet who has, at all successfully, attempted poetry:

But be our burial-grounds, as should become,
A simple, but a not unfeeling race;
Let them appear, to outward semblance, dumb,
As best befits the quiet dwelling-place
Appointed for the prisoners of grace,

Who wait the promise by the Gospel given
When the last trump shall sound—the trembling base
Of tombs, of temples, pyramids, be riven,
And all the dead arise before the hosts of heaven!
Oh! in that awful hour, of what avail

Unto the "spiritual body” will be found

The costliest canopy, or proudest tale
Recorded on it?

As the first possession obtained by the children of Israel in the land of promise was a tomb, it

served as a fitting memorial that they, as well as all their successors on the earth, were strangers and pilgrims; whose wanderings, though prolonged for forty years or upwards, continually tended to a close. Not a grave was ever opened in the world till sin poisoned our nature, and not another shall be opened after sin is destroyed; but though in the mean while we lay our Christian friends in their tombs with mourning and tears, yet we know that they shall be summoned thence with joy, for the dead are not dead, only removed to another and better abode.

Nothing is dead; nay, nothing sleeps; each soul
That ever animated human clay

Now wakes is on the wing.

The very name of Cemetery means a sleepingplace, called so by Christians, because to them the grave is no more than a bed of temporary rest, where man is humbled into the dust for a time, in order that he may afterwards be exalted for ever; but though we must leave our buried friends in the grave, yet not one sleeping atom shall be forgot, as a merciful Creator does not even then forsake them.

The shorter an epitaph is, the better; and one of the most pleasing on record is that mentioned in Hamilton's America, where he observed a grave, covered by a simple stone, bearing no date, but merely this very striking inscription: