Within a quarter of a mile of Concord Common was a natural amphitheatre,
carpeted in late summer with a purple bloom of wild grass, and girt by a
horseshoe-shaped glacial moraine clothed with noble pines and oaks. It
was part of Deacon Brown’s farm, and reached by a lane, with a few houses
on it, cut through a low part of the ridge of hills which sheltered
the old town. When the Deacon died, the town laid out a new road to
Bedford, cutting off this “Sleepy Hollow” (as the townspeople who enjoyed
strolling there had named it) from the rest of the farm. Mr. John S.
Keyes saw the fitness of the ground for a beautiful cemetery, and induced
the town to buy it for that purpose; and as chairman of the committee,
laid out the land. The people of the village—for Concord had nothing
suburban about it then—gathered there one beautiful September afternoon
to choose their resting-places and consecrate the ground. Mr. Emerson
made the address on the slope just below the place where, beneath a
great pine, the tree he loved best, he had chosen the spot for his own
grave.
Much of his essay on Immortality was originally a part of this discourse,
and therefore that portion is omitted here, its place in the essay being
indicated.