Henry T. Tuckerman

‘The hills,
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales,
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods; rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadow green; and, poured round all,
Old ocean’s gray and melancholy waste,
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man.’—Bryant.

The comparatively recent and widely-diffused interest in the establishment of rural cemeteries in this country is an auspicious reaction of popular feeling. Never did a Christian nation manifest so little conservative and exalted sentiment, apart from its direct religious scope, as our own. This patent defect is owing, in a measure, to the absence of the venerable, the time-hallowed, and the contemplative in the scenes and the life of our country; it is, however, confirmed by the busy competition, the hurried, experimental, and ambitious spirit of the people. Local change is the rule, not the exception; scorn of wise delay, moderation, and philosophic content, the prevalent feeling; impatience, temerity, and self-confidence, the characteristic impulse; houses are locomotive, church edifices turned into post-offices, and even theatres; ancestral domains are bartered away in the second generation; old trees bow to the axe; the very sea is encroached upon, and landmarks are removed almost as soon as they grow familiar; change, which is the life of Nature, seems to be regarded as not less the vital element of what is called local improvement and prosperity; the future is almost exclusively regarded, and the past contemned.

If a man cites the precedents of experience, he is sneered at as a ‘fogy;’ if he has a competence, he risks it in speculation; newspapers usurp the attention once given to standard lore; the picturesque rocks of the rural wayside are defiled by quack advertisements, the arcana of spirituality degraded by legerdemain, the dignity of reputation sullied by partisan brutality, the graces of social refinement abrogated by a mercenary standard, the lofty aims of science levelled by charlatan tricks, and independence of character sacrificed to debasing conformity; observation is lost in locomotion, thought in action, ideality in materialism. Against this perversion of life the sanctity of death protests, often vainly to the general mind, but not ineffectually to the individual heart.

When it was attempted to secure the collection of Egyptian antiquities brought hither by Dr. Abbott, of Cairo, for a future scientific museum to be established in New York, the representatives—commercial, professional, and speculative—of ‘Young America’ scorned the bare idea of exchanging gold for mummies, sepulchral lamps, papyrus, and ancient utensils and inscriptions; yet, within a twelvemonth, a celebrated German philologist, a native biblical scholar, and a lecturer on the History of Art, eagerly availed themselves of these contemned relics to prove and illustrate their respective subjects; and the enlightened of Gotham’s utilitarian citizens acknowledged that the trophies of the past were essential to elucidate and confirm the wisdom of the present. It is this idolatry of the immediate which stultifies republican perception. Offer a manuscript to a publisher, and he instantly inquires if it relates to the questions of the day; if not, it is almost certain to be rejected without examination. The conservative element of social life is merged in gregarious intercourse; the youth looks not up to age; the maiden’s susceptibilities are hardened by premature and promiscuous association; external success is glorified, private consistency unhonoured; art becomes a trade, literature an expedient, reform fanaticism; aspiration is chilled, romance outgrown, life unappreciated; and all because the vista of departed time is cut off from our theory of moral perspective, and existence itself is regarded merely as an opportunity for instant and outward success, not a link in an eternal chain reaching ‘before and after.’

Sentiment is the great conservative principle of society; those instincts of patriotism, local attachment, family affection, human sympathy, reverence for truth, age, valour, and wisdom, so often alive and conscious in the child, and overlaid or perverted in the man,—for the culture of which our educational systems, habitual vocations, domestic and social life, make so little provision,—are, in the last analysis, the elements of whatever is noble, efficient, and individual in character; in every moral crisis we appeal to them, as the channels whereby we are linked to God and humanity, and through which alone we can realize just views or lawful action. In our normal condition they may not be often exhibited; yet none the less they constitute the latent force of civil society. To depend upon intelligence and will is, indeed, the creed of the age, and especially of this Republic; but these powers, when unhallowed by the primal and better instincts, react and fail of their end. It is so in individual experience and in national affairs. The absence of the sentiments which the pride of intellect and the brutality of self-will thus repudiate, is the occasion of our greatest errors; to them is the final appeal, through them the only safety; and their violation was the precursor of base and bloody treason; their vindication but the renewal through sacrifice of a normal and vital interest of human society. The war for the Union has been expiatory not less than patriotic. And the great lesson taught by these and similar errors is, that the life, the spirit, the faith of the country had, by a long course of national prosperity and a blind worship of outward success, become gradually but inevitably material; so that motives of patriotism, of reverence, of courtesy, of generous sympathy,—in a word, the sentiments, as distinguished from the passions and the will, had ceased to be recognized as legitimate, and the reliable springs of action and guides of life. It was the repudiation of these which horrified Burke at the outbreak of the French Revolution; he augured the worst from that event, at the best hour of its triumph, because it stripped Humanity of her divine attribute of sentiment, and left her to shiver naked in the cold light of reason and will, unredeemed by the sense of justice, of beauty, of compassion, of honourable pride, which under the name of chivalry he lamented as extinct. He spoke and felt as a man whose brain was kindled by his heart, and whose heart retained the pure impulse of these sacred instincts, and knew their value as the medium of all truth and the basis of civil order. They were temporarily quenched in France by the frenzy of want; they are inactive and in abeyance here, through the gross pressure of material prosperity and mercenary ambition. Hence whatever effectively appeals to them, and whoever sincerely recognizes them, whether by example or precept, in a life or a poem, through art or rhetoric, in respect for the past, love of nature, or devotion to truth and beauty, excites our cordial sympathy. In this age and land, no man is a greater benefactor than he who scorns the worldly and narrow philosophy of life which degrades to a material, unaspiring level the tone of mind and the tendency of the affections. If he invent a character, lay out a domain, erect a statue, weave a stanza, write a paragraph, utter a word, or chant a melody which stirs in any breast the love of the beautiful, admiration for the heroic, or the chastening sense of awe,—any sentiment, in truth, which partakes of disinterestedness, and merges self ‘in an idea dearer than self,’—uplifts, expands, fortifies, intensifies, and therefore inspires,—he is essentially and absolutely a benefactor to society, a genuine though perhaps unrecognized champion of what is ‘highest in man’s nature’ against what is ‘lowest in man’s destiny.’ And not the least because the most universal of these higher and holier feelings is the sentiment of Death, consecrating its symbols, guarding its relics, and keeping fresh and sacred its memories.

The disposition of the mortal remains was, and is, to a considerable extent, in England, an ecclesiastical function; in Catholic lands it is a priestly interest. Indignity to the body, after death, was one of the most dreaded punishments of heresy and crime; to scatter human ashes to the winds, expose the skulls of malefactors in iron gratings over city portals, refuse interment in ground consecrated by the church, and disinter and insult the body of an unpopular ruler, were among the barbarous reprisals of offended power. And yet, in these same twilight eras, in the heathen customs and the mediÆval laws, under the sway of Odin and the Franks, the sentiment of respect for the dead was acted upon in a manner to shame the indifference and hardihood of later and more civilized times. With the emigration to America, this sentiment looked for its legal vindication entirely to the civic authority. With their reaction from spiritual tyranny, our ancestors transferred this, with other social interests, to popular legislation and private inclination. Hence the comparatively indefinite enactments on the subject, and the need of a uniform code, applicable to all the States, and organized so as clearly to establish the rights both of the living and the dead, and to preserve inviolable the choice of disposition, and the place of deposit, of human remains.

The practical treatment of this subject is anomalous. Amid the scenes of horror, outraging humanity in every form, which characterized the anarchy incident to the first dethronement of legitimate authority in France, how startling to read, among the first decrees of the Convention, provisions for the dead, while pitiless destruction awaited the living! And in this country, while motives of hygiÈne limit intermural interments, and a higher impulse sets apart and adorns rural cemeteries, our rail-tracks still often ruthlessly intersect the fields of the dead, and ancestral tombs are annually broken up to make way for streets and warehouses. The tomb of Washington was long dilapidated; the bones of Revolutionary martyrs are neglected, and half the graveyards of the country desecrated by indifference or misuse. The conservative piety of the Hebrews reproaches our inconsiderate neglect, in the faithfully-tended cemetery of their race at Newport, R. I., where not a Jew remains to gather the ashes of his fathers, thus carefully preserved by a testamentary fund. Of late years elaborate monuments in rural cemeteries have done much to redeem this once proverbial neglect. They constitute the most sacred adornment of the environs of our principal cities.

Both the modes and places of burial have an historical significance. The pyre of the Greeks and Romans, the embalming process of the Egyptians, the funeral piles of Hindoo superstition, and those bark stagings, curiously regarded by Mississippi voyagers, where Indian corpses are exposed to the elements,—the old cross-road interment of the suicide, the inhumation of the early patriarchs and Christians,—all symbolize eras and creeds. The lying-in-state of the royal defunct, the sable catafalque of the Catholic temples, the salutes over the warrior’s grave, the ‘Day of the Dead’ celebrated in Southern Europe, the eulogies in French cemeteries, the sublime ritual of the Establishment, and the silent prayer of the Friends,—requiems, processions, emblems, inscriptions, badges, and funereal garlands,—mark faith, nation, rank, and profession at the very gates of the sepulchre. Vain is the sceptic’s sneer, useless the utilitarian’s protest; by these poor tributes the heart utters its undying regret and its immortal prophecies, though ‘mummy has become merchandise,’ and to be ‘but pyramidically extant is a fallacy in duration;’ for, as the same religious philosopher[23] of Norwich declared, ‘it is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell him he is at the end of his nature;’ and, therefore, in the grim Tuscan’s Hell, the souls of those who denied their immortality when in the flesh, are shut up through eternity in living tombs. How the idea of a local abode for the mortal remains is hallowed to our nature, is realized in the pathos which closes the noble and sacred life of the Hebrew lawgiver: ‘And he buried him in a valley of the land of Moab, over against Beth-peor; but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.’[24] Etruria’s best relics are sepulchral urns. Social distinctions are as obvious in the tombs of the ancients as in their palaces: witness the Columbarium in ruins, and the fresh pit of the plebeians; the sandy isles of the Venetian cemetery, and Pompeii’s street of tombs. Byron thought ‘Implora pace’ the most affecting of epitaphs; and the visitor at Coppet recognizes a melancholy appropriateness, in the garden-grave of its gifted mistress.

Natural, therefore, and human, is the consoling thought of the poet, of the ship bringing home for burial all of earth that remains of his lamented friend:—

‘I hear the noise about thy keel;
I hear the bell struck in the night;
I see the cabin-window bright;
I see the sailor at the wheel.
‘Thou bringest the sailor to his wife,
And travelled men from foreign lands;
And letters unto trembling hands;
And thy dark freight, a vanished life.

‘So bring him: we have idle dreams:
This look of quiet flatters thus
Our home-bred fancies; O, to us,
The fools of habit, sweeter seems
‘To rest beneath the clover sod,
That takes the sunshine and the rains,
Or where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God,
‘Than if with thee the roaring wells
Should gulf him fathom deep in brine;
And hands so often clasped in mine
Should toss with tangle and with shells.’[25]

Doubtless many of the processes adopted by blind affection and superstitious homage, to rescue the poor human casket from destruction, are grotesque and undesirable. Had Segato, the discoverer of a chemical method of petrifying flesh, survived to publish the secret, it would be chiefly for anatomical purposes that we should appreciate his invention; there is something revolting in the artificial conservation of what, by the law of Nature, should undergo elemental dissolution; and it is but a senseless homage to cling to the shattered chrysalis when the winged embryo has soared away:

Nature sometimes is a conservative mother even of mortal lineaments; in glacier or tarn, in tuffo and limestone fossils, she keeps for ages the entire relics of humanity. The fantastic array of human bones in the Capuchin cells at Palermo and Rome; the eyeless, shrunken face of Carlo Borromeo embedded in crystal, jewels, and silk, beneath the Milan cathedral; the fleshless figure of old Jeremy Bentham in the raiment of this working-day world; the thousand spicy wrappings which enfold the exhumed mummy whose exhibition provoked Horace Smith’s facetious rhymes,—these, and such as these, poor attempts to do vain honour to our clay, are not less repugnant to the sentiment of death, in its religious and enlightened manifestation, than the promiscuous and careless putting out of sight of the dead after battle and in the reign of pestilence, or the brutal and irreverent disposal of the bodies of the poor in the diurnal pits of the Naples Campo Santo. More accordant with our sense of respect to what once enshrined an immortal spirit, and stood erect and free, even in barbaric manhood, is the adjuration of the bard:—

Yet there are many and judicious reasons for preferring cremation to inhumation; the prejudice against the former having doubtless originated among the early Christians, in their respect for patriarchal entombment, practised by the Jews, and their natural horror at any custom which savoured of heathenism. But there is actually no religious obstacle, and, under proper arrangement, no public inconvenience, in the burning of the dead. It is, too, a process which singularly attracts those who would save the remains of those they love from the possibility of desecration, and anticipate the ultimate fate of the mortal coil ‘to mix for ever with the elements;’ at all events, there can be no rational objection to the exercise of private taste, and the gratification of personal feeling on this point. ‘I bequeath my soul to God,’ said Michael Angelo, in his terse will, ‘my body to the earth, and my possessions to my nearest kin;’—and this right to dispose of one’s mortal remains appears to be instinctive; though the indignation excited by any departure from custom would indicate that, in popular apprehension, the privilege so rarely exercised is illegally usurped.

The outcry in a Western town, a few years ago, when cremation was resorted to, at the earnest desire of a deceased wife; and the offence taken and expressed in an Eastern city, when it became known that a distinguished surgeon, from respect to science, had bequeathed his skeleton to a medical college; evidence how little, among us, is recognized the right of the living to dispose of their remains, and the extent to which popular ignorance and individual prejudice are allowed to interfere in what good sense and good feeling declare an especial matter of private concern. Yet that other than the ordinary modes of disposing of human relics are not absolutely repugnant to endearing associations, may be inferred from the poetic interest which sanctions to the imagination the obsequies of Shelley. Although it was from convenience that the body of that ideal bard, so misunderstood, so humane, so ‘cradled into poesy by wrong,’ was burned, yet the lover of his spiritual muse beholds in that lonely pyre, blazing on the shores of the Mediterranean, an elemental destruction of the material shrine of a lofty and loving soul, accordant with his aspiring, isolated, and imaginative career.[27]Vain, indeed, have proved the studious precautions of Egyptians to conserve from decay and sacrilege the relics of their dead. Not only has ‘mummy become merchandise,’ in the limited sense of the English moralist; the traffic of the Jews in their gums and spices, the distribution of their exhumed forms in museums, and the use of their cases for fuel, is now superseded by commerce in their cerements for the manufacture of paper; and it is a startling evidence of that human vicissitude from which even the shrouds of ancient kings are not exempt, that recently, in one of the new towns of this continent, a newspaper was printed on sheets made from the imported rags of Egyptian mummies.

Of primitive and casual landmarks, encountered on solitary moors and hills, the cairn and the Alpine cross affect the imagination with a sense alike of mortality and tributary sentiment, even more vividly than the elaborate mausoleum, from the rude expedients and the solemn isolation; while the beauty of cathedral architecture is hallowed by ancestral monuments. Of all Scott’s characters, the one that most deeply enlists our sympathies, through that quaint pathos whereby the Past is made eloquent both to fancy and affection, is Old Mortality renewing the half-obliterated inscriptions on the gravestones of the Covenanters, his white hair fluttering in the wind as he stoops to his melancholy task, and his aged pony feeding on the grassy mounds. Even our practical Franklin seized the first leisure from patriotic duties, on his visit to England, in order to examine the sepulchral tablets which bear the names of his progenitors.

A cursory glance at the most cherished trophies of literature indicates how deeply the sentiment of death is wrought into the mind and imagination,—how it invests with awe, love, pity, and hope, thoughtful and gifted spirits, inspires their art, elevates their conceptions, and casts over life and consciousness a sacred mystery. The most finished and suggestive piece of modern English verse is elegiac,—its theme a country churchyard, and so instinct are its melancholy numbers with pathos and reflection, embalmed in rhythmical music, that its lines have passed into household words. Our national poet, who has sung of Nature in all her characteristic phases on this continent, next to those ever-renewed glories of the universe has found his chief inspiration in the same reverent contemplation: Thanatopsis was his first grand offering to the Muses, and The Disinterred Warrior, the Hymn to Death, and The Old Man’s Funeral, are but pious variations of a strain worthy to be chanted in the temple of humanity. Shakspeare in no instance comes nearer what is highest in our common nature and miraculous in our experience, than when he makes the philosophic Dane question his soul and confront mortality. The once popular and ever-memorable Night Thoughts of Young elaborate kindred ideas in the light of Christian truth; the most quaintly eloquent of early speculative writings in English prose is Sir Thomas Browne’s treatise on Urn-Burial. The most thoughtful and earnest of modern Italian poems is Foscolo’s Sepolchri; the Monody on Sir John Moore, Shelley’s Elegy on Keats, Tickell’s on Addison, Byron’s on Sheridan, and Tennyson’s In Memoriam, contain the most sincere and harmonious utterances of their authors. Not the least affecting pages of The Sketch Book are those which describe the ‘Village Funeral’ and the ‘Widow’s Son;’ and the endeared author has marked his own sense of the local sanctity of the grave by selecting that of his family in ‘Sleepy Hollow,’ in the midst of scenes endeared by his abode and his fame. Halleck has given lyrical immortality to the warrior’s death in the cause of freedom; and Wordsworth, in perhaps his most quoted ballad, has recorded with exquisite simplicity childhood’s unconsciousness of death; even the most analytical of French novelists found, in the laws and ceremonial of a Parisian interment, material for his keenest diagnosis of the scenes of life in that marvellous capital. Hope’s best descriptive powers were enlisted in his sketch of burial-places near Constantinople, so pensively contrasting with the more adventurous chapters of Anastasius. If in popular literature this sentiment is so constantly appealed to, and so enshrined in the poet’s dream and the philosopher’s speculation, classic and Hebrew authors have inscribed its memorials in outlines of majestic and graceful import; around it the picturesque and the moralizing, the vivacious and the grandly simple expressions of the Roman, the Greek, and the Jewish writers seem to hover with the significant plaint—heroism or faith—which invokes us, with the voice of ages, to

Perhaps there is no instance of this vague and awful interest more memorable to the American than when he reads, on some ancient tablet in the Old World, the burial record of his ancestors.

The monitory and reminiscent influence of the churchyard, apart from all personal associations, cannot, indeed, be over-estimated; doubtless in a spirit of propriety and good taste, it is now more frequently suburban, made attractive by trees, flowers, a wide landscape, and rural peace, and rendered comparatively safe from desecration by distance from the so-called march of improvement which annually changes the aspect of our growing towns. Yet, wherever situated, the homes of the dead, when made eloquent by art, and kept fresh by reverent care, breathe a chastening and holy lesson, perhaps the more impressive when uttered beside the teeming camp of life. To the traveller in Europe it is a pathetic sight to watch the Norwegian peasants strew flowers, every Sabbath, on the graves of their kindred, and gives a living interest to the memorials of Scandinavian antiquity gathered in the museums, whereby, through the weapons and drinking-cups of stone, bronze, and iron, exhumed from graves, he traces the origin and growth of that remote civilization. And when time has softened the most acute and bitter memories of the War for the Union, what monument to individual prowess, what trophy of patriotic self-sacrifice will compare, in solemn and elevating pathos, with the impression derived from the ‘national cemeteries’ of the battle-field and the hospital? As Lincoln said of Gettysburg,—‘they will dedicate us afresh to our country, to humanity, and to God.’

When the traveller gazes on the marble effigy of the warrior at Ravenna, and then treads the plain where Gaston de Foix fell in battle, the fixed lineaments and obsolete armour bring home to his mind the very life of the middle ages, solemnized by youthful heroism and early death; when he scans the vast city beneath its smoky veil—thick with roofs and dotted with spires,—from an elevated point of PÈre la Chaise, the humble and garlanded cross, and the chiselled names of the wise and brave that surround him, cause the parallel and inwoven mysteries of life and death to stir the fountains of his heart with awe, and make his lips tremble into prayer; and, familiar as is the spectacle, the more thoughtful of the throng in New York’s bustling thoroughfare will sometimes pause and cast a salutary glance from the hurrying crowd to the monuments of the heroic Lawrence, the eloquent Emmet, the gallant Montgomery, and the patriotic Hamilton. Those associations which form at once the culture and the romance of travel are identified with the same eternal sentiment. Next in interest to the monuments of genius and character are those of death; or rather, the inspiration of the former are everywhere consecrated by the latter.

Nero dug his own grave, lest he should be denied burial, and Shakspeare guarded his own ashes by an imprecatory epitaph; David praises the men of Jabesh Gilead who rescue the bones of their king from the enemy. It is a sweet custom,—that of making little excavations in sepulchral slabs to catch the rain, that birds may be lured thither to drink and sing. The Chinese sell themselves in order to obtain means to bury their parents.

We enter a city of antiquity—memorable Syracuse or disinterred Pompeii—through a street of tombs; the majestic relics of Egyptian civilization are the cenotaphs of kings; the Escurial is Spain’s architectural elegy; Abelard’s philosophy is superseded, but his love and death live daily to the vision of the mourners who go from the gay capital of France, to place chaplets on the graves of departed friends;[28] the grandeurs of Westminster Abbey are sublimated by the effigies of bards and statesmen, and the rare music of St. George’s choir made solemn by the dust of royalty; deserted Ravenna is peopled with intense life by the creations of Dante which haunt his sepulchre; Arqua is the shrine of affectionate pilgrims; the radiant hues and graceful shapes of Titian and Canova become ethereal to the fancy, when viewed beside their monuments; St. Peter’s is but a magnificent apostolic tomb; and the shadow of mortality is incarnated in Lorenzo’s brooding figure in the jewelled temple of the dead Medici. Even the dim, half-explored catacombs of Rome yield significant testimony to the Christian’s heart to-day. ‘The works of painting found within them,’ well says a recent writer, ‘their construction, the inscriptions on the graves,—all unite in bearing witness to the simplicity of the faith, the purity of the doctrine, the strength of the feeling, the change in the lives of the vast mass of the members of the early church of Christ.’[29]

What resorts are Santa Croce, Mount Vernon, Saint Paul’s, and Saint Onofrio! What a goal, through ages, the Holy Sepulchre! How the dim escutcheons sanctify cathedrals, and sunken headstones the rural cemetery! How sacred the mystery of the Campagna hid in that ‘stern round tower of other days,’ which bears the name of a Roman matron! The beautiful sarcophagus of Scipio, the feudal crypt of Theodric, the silent soldier of the Invalides, the mossy cone of Caius CÆstus, in whose shadow two English poets[30] yet speak in graceful epitaphs, Thorwaldsen’s grand mausoleum at Copenhagen, composed of his own trophies,—what objects are these to win the mind back into the lapsing ages, and upward with ‘immortal longings!’ We turn from brilliant thoroughfares, alive with creatures of a day, to catacombs obscure with the impalpable dust of bygone generations; we pass from the vociferous piazza to the hushed and frescoed cloister, and walk on mural tablets whose inscriptions are worn by the feet of vanished multitudes; we steal from the cheerful highway to the field of mounds, where a shaft, a cross, or a garland breathes of surviving tenderness; we handle the cloudy lachrymal, quaint depository of long-evaporated tears, or admire the sculptured urn, the casket of what was unutterably precious, even in mortality; and thereby life is solemnized, consciousness deepened, and we feel, above the tyrannous present, and through the casual occupation of the hour, the ‘electric chain wherewith we’re darkly bound.’ ‘When I look upon the tombs of the great,’ says Addison, ‘every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow. When I see kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind. When I read the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great day when we shall all of us be contemporaries, and make our appearance together.’ Thus perpetual is the hymn of death, thus ubiquitous its memorials—attesting not only an inevitable destiny, but a universal sentiment; under whatever name,—God’s Acre, Pantheon, Campo Santo, Valhalla, Potter’s Field, Greenwood, or Mount Auburn,—the last resting-place of the body, the last earthly shrine of human love, fame, and sorrow, claims—by the pious instinct which originates, the holy rites which consecrate, the blessed hopes which glorify it—respect, protection, and sanctity.

There is, indeed, no spot of earth so hallowed to the contemplative as that which holds the ashes of an intellectual benefactor. What a grateful tribute does the trans-atlantic pilgrim instinctively offer at the sepulchre of Roscoe at Liverpool, of Lafayette in France, of Berkeley at Oxford, of Burns at Alloway Kirk, and of Keats and Goldsmith,—of all the bards, philosophers, and reformers whose conceptions warmed and exalted his dawning intelligence, and became thereby sacred to his memory for ever! How fruitful the hours—snatched from less serene pleasure—devoted to Stratford, Melrose, and the Abbey! To realize the value of these opportunities, the spirit of humanity enshrined in such ‘Meccas of the mind,’ we must fancy the barrenness of earth stripped of these landmarks of the gifted and the lost. How denuded of its most tender light would be Olney, Stoke Pogis, the vale of Florence, the cypress groves of Rome, and the park at Weimar, unconsecrated by the sepulchres of Cowper and Gray, Michael Angelo, Tasso, and Schiller, whose sweet and lofty remembrance links meadow and stream, mountain and sunset, with the thought of all that is most pensive, beautiful, and sublime in genius and in woe.