It needs scarcely be said, that an Epitaph presupposes a Monument,
upon which it is to be engraven. Almost all Nations have wished that
certain external signs should point out the places where their Dead
are interred. Among savage Tribes unacquainted with Letters, this has
mostly been done either by rude stones placed near the Graves, or by
Mounds of earth raised over them. This custom proceeded obviously from
a twofold desire; first, to guard the remains of the deceased from
irreverent approach or from savage violation: and, secondly, to
preserve their memory. "Never any," says Camden, "neglected burial but
some savage Nations; as the Bactrians, which cast their dead to the
dogs; some varlet Philosophers, as Diogenes, who desired to be
devoured of fishes; some dissolute Courtiers, as Maecenas, who was wont
to say, Non tumulum curo; sepelit natura relictos.
"I'm careless of a Grave:--Nature her dead will save."
As soon as Nations had learned the use of letters, Epitaphs were
inscribed upon these Monuments; in order that their intention might be
more surely and adequately fulfilled. I have derived Monuments and
Epitaphs from two sources of feeling: but these do in fact resolve
themselves into one. The invention of Epitaphs, Weever, in his
Discourse of Funeral Monuments, says rightly, "proceeded from the
presage or fore-feeling of Immortality, implanted in all men
naturally, and is referred to the Scholars of Linus the Theban Poet,
who flourished about the year of the World two thousand seven hundred;
who first bewailed this Linus their Master, when he was slain, in
doleful verses, then called of him OElina, afterwards Epitaphia, for
that they were first sung at burials, after engraved upon the
Sepulchres."
And, verily, without the consciousness of a principle of Immortality
in the human soul, Man could never have had awakened in him the desire
to live in the remembrance of his fellows: mere love, or the yearning
of Kind towards Kind, could not have produced it. The Dog or Horse
perishes in the field, or in the stall, by the side of his companions,
and is incapable of anticipating the sorrow with which his surrounding
Associates shall bemoan his death, or pine for his loss; he cannot
pre-conceive this regret, he can form no thought of it; and therefore
cannot possibly have a desire to leave such regret or remembrance
behind him. Add to the principle of love, which exists in the inferior
animals, the faculty of reason which exists in Man alone; will the
conjunction of these account for the desire? Doubtless it is a
necessary consequence of this conjunction; yet not I think as a direct
result, but only to be come at through an intermediate thought, viz.
That of an intimation or assurance within us, that some part of our
nature is imperishable. At least the precedence, in order of birth, of
one feeling to the other, is unquestionable. If we look back upon the
days of childhood, we shall find that the time is not in remembrance
when, with respect to our own individual Being, the mind was without
this assurance; whereas the wish to be remembered by our Friends or
Kindred after Death, or even in Absence, is, as we shall discover, a
sensation that does not form itself till the _social_ feelings have
been developed, and the Reason has connected itself with a wide range
of objects. Forlorn, and cut off from communication with the best part
of his nature, must that Man be, who should derive the sense of
immortality, as it exists in the mind of a Child, from the same
unthinking gaiety or liveliness of animal Spirits with which the Lamb
in the meadow, or any other irrational Creature, is endowed; who
should ascribe it, in short, to blank ignorance in the Child; to an
inability arising from the imperfect state of his faculties to come,
in any point of his being, into contact with a notion of Death; or to
an unreflecting acquiescence in what had been instilled into him! Has
such an unfolder of the mysteries of Nature, though he may have
forgotten his former self, ever noticed the early, obstinate, and
unappeasable inquisitiveness of Children upon the subject of
origination? This single fact proves outwardly the monstrousness of
those suppositions: for, if we had no direct external testimony that
the minds of very young Children meditate feelingly upon Death and
Immortality, these inquiries, which we all know they are perpetually
making concerning the _whence_, do necessarily include correspondent
habits of interrogation concerning the _whither_. Origin and tendency
are notions inseparably co-relative. Never did a Child stand by the
side of a running Stream, pondering within himself what power was the
feeder of the perpetual current, from what never-wearied sources the
body of water was supplied, but he must have been inevitably propelled
to follow this question by another: "towards what abyss is it in
progress? what receptacle can contain the mighty influx?" And the
spirit of the answer must have been, though the word might be Sea or
Ocean, accompanied perhaps with an image gathered from a Map, or from
the real object in Nature--these might have been the _letter_, but the
_spirit_ of the answer must have been _as_ inevitably,--a receptacle
without bounds or dimensions;--nothing less than infinity. We may,
then, be justified in asserting, that the sense of Immortality, if not
a co-existent and twin birth with Reason, is among the earliest of her
Offspring: and we may further assert, that from these conjoined, and
under their countenance, the human affections are gradually formed and
opened out. This is not the place to enter into the recesses of these
investigations; but the subject requires me here to make a plain
avowal, that, for my own part, it is to me inconceivable, that the
sympathies of love towards each other, which grow with our growth,
could ever attain any new strength, or even preserve the old, after we
had received from the outward senses the impression of Death, and were
in the habit of having that impression daily renewed and its
accompanying feeling brought home to ourselves, and to those we love;
if the same were not counteracted by those communications with our
internal Being, which are anterior to all these experiences, and with
which revelation coincides, and has through that coincidence alone
(for otherwise it could not possess it) a power to affect us. I
confess, with me the conviction is absolute, that, if the impression
and sense of Death were not thus counterbalanced, such a hollowness
would pervade the whole system of things, such a want of
correspondence and consistency, a disproportion so astounding betwixt
means and ends, that there could be no repose, no joy. Were we to grow
up unfostered by this genial warmth, a frost would chill the spirit,
so penetrating and powerful, that there could be no motions of the
life of love; and infinitely less could we have any wish to be
remembered after we had passed away from a world in which each man had
moved about like a shadow.--If, then, in a Creature endowed with the
faculties of foresight and reason, the social affections could not
have unfolded themselves uncountenanced by the faith that Man is an
immortal being; and if, consequently, neither could the individual
dying have had a desire to survive in the remembrance of his fellows,
nor on their side could they have felt a wish to preserve for future
times vestiges of the departed; it follows, as a final inference, that
without the belief in Immortality, wherein these several desires
originate, neither monuments nor epitaphs, in affectionate or
laudatory commemoration of the Deceased, could have existed in the
world.
Simonides, it is related, upon landing in a strange Country, found the
Corse of an unknown person, lying by the Sea-side; he buried it, and
was honoured throughout Greece for the piety of that Act. Another
ancient Philosopher, chancing to fix his eyes upon a dead Body,
regarded the same with slight, if not with contempt; saying, "see the
Shell of the flown Bird!" But it is not to be supposed that the moral
and tender-hearted Simonides was incapable of the lofty movements of
thought, to which that other Sage gave way at the moment while his
soul was intent only upon the indestructible being; nor, on the other
hand, that he, in whose sight a lifeless human Body was of no more
value than the worthless Shell from which the living fowl had
departed, would not, in a different mood of mind, have been affected
by those earthly considerations which had incited the philosophic Poet
to the performance of that pious duty. And with regard to this latter
we may be assured that, if he had been destitute of the capability of
communing with the more exalted thoughts that appertain to human
Nature, he would have cared no more for the Corse of the Stranger than
for the dead body of a Seal or Porpoise which might have been cast up
by the Waves. We respect the corporeal frame of Man, not merely
because it is the habitation of a rational, but of an immortal Soul.
Each of these Sages was in Sympathy with the best feelings of our
Nature; feelings which, though they seem opposite to each other, have
another and a finer connection than that of contrast.--It is a
connection formed through the subtle progress by which, both in the
natural and the moral world, qualities pass insensibly into their
contraries, and things revolve upon each other. As, in sailing upon
the orb of this Planet, a voyage towards the regions where the sun
sets, conducts gradually to the quarter where we have been accustomed
to behold it come forth at its rising; and, in like manner, a voyage
towards the east, the birth-place in our imagination of the morning,
leads finally to the quarter where the Sun is last seen when he
departs from our eyes; so the contemplative Soul, travelling in the
direction of mortality, advances to the Country of everlasting Life;
and, in like manner, may she continue to explore those cheerful
tracts, till she is brought back, for her advantage and benefit, to
the land of transitory things--of sorrow and of tears.
On a midway point, therefore, which commands the thoughts and feelings
of the two Sages whom we have represented in contrast, does the Author
of that species of composition, the Laws of which it is our present
purpose to explain, take his stand. Accordingly, recurring to the
twofold desire of guarding the Remains of the deceased and preserving
their memory, it may be said that a sepulchral Monument is a tribute
to a Man as a human Being; and that an Epitaph, (in the ordinary
meaning attached to the word) includes this general feeling and
something more; and is a record to preserve the memory of the dead, as
a tribute due to his individual worth, for a satisfaction to the
sorrowing hearts of the Survivors, and for the common benefit of the
living: which record is to be accomplished, not in a general manner,
but, where it can, in _close connection with the bodily remains of the
deceased_: and these, it may be added, among the modern Nations of
Europe are deposited within, or contiguous to their places of worship.
In ancient times, as is well known, it was the custom to bury the dead
beyond the Walls of Towns and Cities; and among the Greeks and Romans
they were frequently interred by the waysides.
I could here pause with pleasure, and invite the Reader to indulge
with me in contemplation of the advantages which must have attended
such a practice. We might ruminate upon the beauty which the
Monuments, thus placed, must have borrowed from the surrounding images
of Nature--from the trees, the wild flowers, from a stream running
perhaps within sight or hearing, from the beaten road stretching its
weary 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 embosomed. Thoughts in the same
temper as these have already been expressed with true sensibility by
an ingenious 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 strayed:
* * * * *
--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 sympathized,
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 over 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.--