I like that ancient Saxon phrase with calls
The burial-ground God’s Acre. LONGFELLOW.
The following lines are from “A Dirge,” by Rev. George Croly, an English
clergyman and voluminous writer:
Earth to earth and dust to dust!
Here the evil and the just,
Here the youthful and the old,
Here the fearful and the bold,
Here the matron and the maid
In one silent bed are laid;
Here the sword and sceptre rust—
Earth to earth and dust to dust.
From Plato:
The sceptred king, the burdened slave,
The humble and the haughty die;
The rich, the poor, the base, the brave,
In dust without distinction lie.
In the last two lines of the “Elegy to the memory of an unfortunate
lady”:
A heap of dust alone remains of thee;
’Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be,
Pope apparently had in mind the friendly admonition of Horace to
Torquatus (Carm. iv. 7):
“Nos ubi decidimus
Quo pater Æneas, quo dives Tullus et Ancus,
Pulvis et umbra sumus.”
Over the grave of Dean Alford in the church-yard of St. Martin’s,
Canterbury, is the following inscription, prepared by his own hand: “The
inn of a traveller, on his way to the New Jerusalem.”
Daniel Webster’s epitaph, written by himself, at Marshfield, is as
follows:
Lord,
I believe,
Help Thou
mine unbelief.
Philosophical argument,
especially that
drawn from the vastness
of the universe in compare-
son with the apparent insigni-
ficance of this globe, has some-
times shaken my reason for the faith
that is in me; but my heart has
assured me that the Gospel of Jesus
Christ must be a divine reality.
The Sermon on the Mount can
not be a merely human
production. This belief
enters into the very
depth of my con-
science. The
whole his-
tory of
man proves it.
In Greenmount Cemetery, Baltimore, on the monument to the memory of the
great tragedian, Junius Brutus Booth, is the following inscription:
Ex vita, ita discedo
tamquam ex Hospitio,
in furvum regnum
inclytissimi Ducis; illinc
ire ad Astra.
Which may be translated: Thus I depart from life, as one leaves an inn,
into the dusky realm of a most renowned leader; thence I go beyond the
stars.
_The Blue and the Gray_
The inscription on the Soldiers’ Monument on the Common, in the City of
Boston, is as follows:
To the men of Boston who died for their country on land and sea in the
War which kept the Union whole, destroyed slavery, and maintained the
Constitution, the grateful city has built this monument that their
example may speak to coming generations.
It is hinted in the Boston newspapers that the inscription from the pen
of President Eliot, of Harvard University, was suggested to him by the
following lines sent to him by Professor James Russell Lowell:
To men who die for her on land and sea
That you might have a country great and free,
Boston rears this. Build you their monument
In lives like theirs at duty’s summons spent.
The woman’s Confederate monument in Charleston, S. C., bears an
inscription beginning thus:
This monument perpetuates the memory of those who, true to the instincts
of their birth, faithful to the teachings of their fathers, constant in
their love for the State, died in the performance of their duty; who
have glorified a fallen cause by the simple manhood of their lives, the
patient endurance of suffering and the heroism of death, and who in the
dark hours of imprisonment, in the hopelessness of the hospital, in the
short, sharp agony of the field, found support and consolation in the
belief that at home they would not be forgotten.
_George Eliot_
The inscription on the granite obelisk which forms George Eliot’s
gravestone, besides recording her pseudonym and real name, with the
dates of birth and death, bears the first lines of her poem, commencing:
Oh may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge man’s search
To vaster issues.
At Avignon, France, is the marble sarcophagus of John Stuart Mill and
his wife, on the top of which is the following eulogy: