ncient burial-ground I
noticed much variety of monumental sculpture. The elder stones, dated
a century back or more, have borders elaborately carved with flowers
and are adorned with a multiplicity of death's-heads, crossbones,
scythes, hour-glasses, and other lugubrious emblems of mortality, with
here and there a winged cherub to direct the mourner's spirit upward.
These productions of Gothic taste must have been quite beyond the
colonial skill of the day, and were probably carved in London and
brought across the ocean to commemorate the defunct worthies of this
lonely isle. The more recent monuments are mere slabs of slate in the
ordinary style, without any superfluous flourishes to set off the bald
inscriptions. But others--and those far the most impressive both to my
taste and feelings--were roughly hewn from the gray rocks of the
island, evidently by the unskilled hands of surviving friends and
relatives. On some there were merely the initials of a name; some were
inscribed with misspelt prose or rhyme, in deep letters which the moss
and wintry rain of many years had not been able to obliterate. These,
these were graves where loved ones slept. It is an old theme of
satire, the falsehood and vanity of monumental eulogies; but when
affection and sorrow grave the letters with their own painful labor,
then we may be sure that they copy from the record on their hearts.

My acquaintance the sculptor--he may share that title with Greenough,
since the dauber of signs is a painter as well as Raphael--had found a
ready market for all his blank slabs of marble and full occupation in
lettering and ornamenting them. He was an elderly man, a descendant of
the old Puritan family of Wigglesworth, with a certain simplicity and
singleness both of heart and mind which, methinks, is more rarely
found among us Yankees than in any other community of people. In spite
of his gray head and wrinkled brow, he was quite like a child in all
matters save what had some reference to his own business; he seemed,
unless my fancy misled me, to view mankind in no other relation than
as people in want of tombstones, and his literary attainments
evidently comprehended very little either of prose of poetry which had
not at one time or other been inscribed on slate or marble. His sole
task and office among the immortal pilgrims of the tomb--the duty for
which Providence had sent the old man into the world, as it were with
a chisel in his hand--was to lab