ed.
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 church-yard, 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
journeying. Hence a parish-church, in the stillness of the country, is a
visible centre of a community of the living and the dead; a point to