ry 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 church-yard 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 embosom