tribunal of a free country, where the character of the judge, the
integrity of the jury, and the learning and eloquence of the advocates
have equalled the moral exigencies and the ideal dignity of the scene, and
when the case has possessed a high tragic or social interest, can never
lose the impression thus derived of the majesty of the law. No public
scene of human life can surpass it to the apprehension of a thoughtful
spectator. He seems to behold the principle of justice as it exists in the
very elements of humanity, and to stand on the primeval foundation of
civil society; the searching struggle for truth, the conscientious
application of law to evidence, the stern recital of the prosecutor, the
appeal of the defence, the constant test of inquiry, of reference to
statutes and precedents, the luminous arrangement of conflicting facts by
the judge, his impartial deductions and clear final statement, the
interval of suspense and the solemn verdict, combine to present a calm,
reflective, almost sublime exercise of the intellect and moral sentiments,
in order to conform authority to their highest dictates, which elevates
and widens the function and the glory of human life and duty. Compare with
such a picture the base mockery of justice exhibited by the Inquisition of
old, and an Austrian court-martial of our own day; the arbitrary fiat of
an Eastern official, and the murderous ordeal of the provisional bodies
that ruled during the first French revolution; and it is easy to
appreciate the identity of justly-administered law with civilization and
freedom. 'Justice,' says Webster, 'is the great interest of man on earth.
It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations
together. Wherever her temple stands, and as long as it is duly honoured,
there is a foundation for social security, general happiness, and the
improvement and progress of our race; and whoever labours on this edifice
with usefulness and distinction, whoever clears its foundations,
strengthens its pillars, adorns its entablatures, or contributes to raise
its august dome still higher in the skies, connects himself--in name, and
fame, and character--with that which is, and must be, as durable as the
frame of human society.'
SEPULCHRES.
'The hills,
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales,
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods; rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadow green; and, poured round all,
Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste,
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man.'--BRYANT.
The comparatively recent and widely-diffused interest in the establishment
of rural cemeteries in this country is an auspicious reaction of popular
feeling. Never did a Christian nation manifest so little conservative and
exalted sentiment, apart from its direct religious scope, as our own. This
patent defect is owing, in a measure, to the absence of the venerable, the
time-hallowed, and the contemplative in the scenes and the life of our
country; it is, however, confirmed by the busy competition, the hurried,
experimental, and ambitious spirit of the people. Local change is the
rule, not the exception; scorn of wise delay, moderation, and philosophic
content, the prevalent feeling; impatience, temerity, and self-confidence,
the characteristic impulse; houses are locomotive, church edifices turned
into post-offices, and even theatres; ancestral domains are bartered away
in the second generation; old trees bow to the axe; the very sea is
encroached upon, and landmarks are removed almost as soon as they grow
familiar; change, which is the life of Nature, seems to be regarded as not
less the vital element of what is called local improvement and prosperity;
the future is almost exclusively regarded, and the past contemned.
If a man cites the precedents of experience, he is sneered at as a 'fogy;'
if he has a competence, he risks it in speculation; newspapers usurp the
attention once given to standard lore; the picturesque rocks of the rural
wayside are defiled by quack advertisements, the arcana of spirituality
degraded by legerdemain, the dignity of reputation sullied by partisan
brutality, the graces of social refinement abrogated by a mercenary
standard, the lofty aims of science levelled by charlatan tricks, and
independence of character sacrificed to debasing conformity; observation
is lost in locomotion, thought in action, ideality in materialism. Against
this perversion of life the sanctity of death protests, often vainly to
the general mind, but not ineffectually to the individual heart.
When it was attempted to secure the collection of Egyptian antiquities
brought hither by Dr. Abbott, of Cairo, for a future scientific museum to
be established in New York, the representatives--commercial, professional,
and speculative--of 'Young America' scorned the bare idea of exchanging
gold for mummies, sepulchral lamps, papyrus, and ancient utensils and
inscriptions; yet, within a twelvemonth, a celebrated German philologist,
a native biblical scholar, and a lecturer on the History of Art, eagerly
availed themselves of these contemned relics to prove and illustrate their
respective subjects; and the enlightened of Gotham's utilitarian citizens
acknowledged that the trophies of the past were essential to elucidate and
confirm the wisdom of the present. It is this idolatry of the immediate
which stultifies republican perception. Offer a manuscript to a publisher,
and he instantly inquires if it relates to the questions of the day; if
not, it is almost certain to be rejected without examination. The
conservative element of social life is merged in gregarious intercourse;
the youth looks not up to age; the maiden's susceptibilities are hardened
by premature and promiscuous association; external success is glorified,
private consistency unhonoured; art becomes a trade, literature an
expedient, reform fanaticism; aspiration is chilled, romance outgrown,
life unappreciated; and all because the vista of departed time is cut off
from our theory of moral perspective, and existence itself is regarded
merely as an opportunity for instant and outward success, not a link in an
eternal chain reaching 'before and after.'
Sentiment is the great conservative principle of society; those instincts
of patriotism, local attachment, family affection, human sympathy,
reverence for truth, age, valour, and wisdom, so often alive and conscious
in the child, and overlaid or perverted in the man,--for the culture of
which our educational systems, habitual vocations, domestic and social
life, make so little provision,--are, in the last analysis, the elements
of whatever is noble, efficient, and individual in character; in every
moral crisis we appeal to them, as the channels whereby we are linked to
God and humanity, and through which alone we can realize just views or
lawful action. In our normal condition they may not be often exhibited;
yet none the less they constitute the latent force of civil society. To
depend upon intelligence and will is, indeed, the creed of the age, and
especially of this Republic; but these powers, when unhallowed by the
primal and better instincts, react and fail of their end. It is so in
individual experience and in national affairs. The absence of the
sentiments which the pride of intellect and the brutality of self-will
thus repudiate, is the occasion of our greatest errors; to them is the
final appeal, through them the only safety; and their violation was the
precursor of base and bloody treason; their vindication but the renewal
through sacrifice of a normal and vital interest of human society. The
war for the Union has been expiatory not less than patriotic. And the
great lesson taught by these and similar errors is, that the life, the
spirit, the faith of the country had, by a long course of national
prosperity and a blind worship of outward success, become gradually but
inevitably material; so that motives of patriotism, of reverence, of
courtesy, of generous sympathy,--in a word, the sentiments, as
distinguished from the passions and the will, had ceased to be recognized
as legitimate, and the reliable springs of action and guides of life. It
was the repudiation of these which horrified Burke at the outbreak of the
French Revolution; he augured the worst from that event, at the best hour
of its triumph, because it stripped Humanity of her divine attribute of
sentiment, and left her to shiver naked in the cold light of reason and
will, unredeemed by the sense of justice, of beauty, of compassion, of
honourable pride, which under the name of chivalry he lamented as extinct.
He spoke and felt as a man whose brain was kindled by his heart, and whose
heart retained the pure impulse of these sacred instincts, and knew their
value as the medium of all truth and the basis of civil order. They were
temporarily quenched in France by the frenzy of want; they are inactive
and in abeyance here, through the gross pressure of material prosperity
and mercenary ambition. Hence whatever effectively appeals to them, and
whoever sincerely recognizes them, whether by example or precept, in a
life or a poem, through art or rhetoric, in respect for the past, love of
nature, or devotion to truth and beauty, excites our cordial sympathy. In
this age and land, no man is a greater benefactor than he who scorns the
worldly and narrow philosophy of life which degrades to a material,
unaspiring level the tone of mind and the tendency of the affections. If
he invent a character, lay out a domain, erect a statue, weave a stanza,
write a paragraph, utter a word, or chant a melody which stirs in any
breast the love of the beautiful, admiration for the heroic, or the
chastening sense of awe,--any sentiment, in truth, which partakes of
disinterestedness, and merges self 'in an idea dearer than
self,'--uplifts, expands, fortifies, intensifies, and therefore
inspires,--he is essentially and absolutely a benefactor to society, a
genuine though perhaps unrecognized champion of what is 'highest in man's
nature' against what is 'lowest in man's destiny.' And not the least
because the most universal of these higher and holier feelings is the
sentiment of Death, consecrating its symbols, guarding its relics, and
keeping fresh and sacred its memories.
The disposition of the mortal remains was, and is, to a considerable
extent, in England, an ecclesiastical function; in Catholic lands it is a
priestly interest. Indignity to the body, after death, was one of the most
dreaded punishments of heresy and crime; to scatter human ashes to the
winds, expose the skulls of malefactors in iron gratings over city
portals, refuse interment in ground consecrated by the church, and
disinter and insult the body of an unpopular ruler, were among the
barbarous reprisals of offended power. And yet, in these same twilight
eras, in the heathen customs and the mediæval laws, under the sway of Odin
and the Franks, the sentiment of respect for the dead was acted upon in a
manner to shame the indifference and hardihood of later and more civilized
times. With the emigration to America, this sentiment looked for its legal
vindication entirely to the civic authority. With their reaction from
spiritual tyranny, our ancestors transferred this, with other social
interests, to popular legislation and private inclination. Hence the
comparatively indefinite enactments on the subject, and the need of a
uniform code, applicable to all the States, and organized so as clearly to
establish the rights both of the living and the dead, and to preserve
inviolable the choice of disposition, and the place of deposit, of human
remains.
The practical treatment of this subject is anomalous. Amid the scenes of
horror, outraging humanity in every form, which characterized the anarchy
incident to the first dethronement of legitimate authority in France, how
startling to read, among the first decrees of the Convention, provisions
for the dead, while pitiless destruction awaited the living! And in this
country, while motives of _hygiène_ limit intermural interments, and a
higher impulse sets apart and adorns rural cemeteries, our rail-tracks
still often ruthlessly intersect the fields of the dead, and ancestral
tombs are annually broken up to make way for streets and warehouses. The
tomb of Washington was long dilapidated; the bones of Revolutionary
martyrs are neglected, and half the graveyards of the country desecrated
by indifference or misuse. The conservative piety of the Hebrews
reproaches our inconsiderate neglect, in the faithfully-tended cemetery of
their race at Newport, R. I., where not a Jew remains to gather the ashes
of his fathers, thus carefully preserved by a testamentary fund. Of late
years elaborate monuments in rural cemeteries have done much to redeem
this once proverbial neglect. They constitute the most sacred adornment of
the environs of our principal cities.
Both the modes and places of burial have an historical significance. The
pyre of the Greeks and Romans, the embalming process of the Egyptians, the
funeral piles of Hindoo superstition, and those bark stagings, curiously
regarded by Mississippi voyagers, where Indian corpses are exposed to the
elements,--the old cross-road interment of the suicide, the inhumation of
the early patriarchs and Christians,--all symbolize eras and creeds. The
lying-in-state of the royal defunct, the sable catafalque of the Catholic
temples, the salutes over the warrior's grave, the 'Day of the Dead'
celebrated in Southern Europe, the eulogies in French cemeteries, the
sublime ritual of the Establishment, and the silent prayer of the
Friends,--requiems, processions, emblems, inscriptions, badges, and
funereal garlands,--mark faith, nation, rank, and profession at the very
gates of the sepulchre. Vain is the sceptic's sneer, useless the
utilitarian's protest; by these poor tributes the heart utters its undying
regret and its immortal prophecies, though 'mummy has become merchandise,'
and to be 'but pyramidically extant is a fallacy in duration;' for, as the
same religious philosopher[23] of Norwich declared, 'it is the heaviest
stone that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell him he is at the end of
his nature;' and, therefore, in the grim Tuscan's Hell, the souls of those
who denied their immortality when in the flesh, are shut up through
eternity in living tombs. How the idea of a local abode for the mortal
remains is hallowed to our nature, is realized in the pathos which closes
the noble and sacred life of the Hebrew lawgiver: 'And he buried him in a
valley of the land of Moab, over against Beth-peor; but no man knoweth of
his sepulchre unto this day.'[24] Etruria's best relics are sepulchral
urns. Social distinctions are as obvious in the tombs of the ancients as
in their palaces: witness the Columbarium in ruins, and the fresh pit of
the plebeians; the sandy isles of the Venetian cemetery, and Pompeii's
street of tombs. Byron thought '_Implora pace_' the most affecting of
epitaphs; and the visitor at Coppet recognizes a melancholy
appropriateness, in the garden-grave of its gifted mistress.
Natural, therefore, and human, is the consoling thought of the poet, of
the ship bringing home for burial all of earth that remains of his
lamented friend:--
'I hear the noise about thy keel;
I hear the bell struck in the night;
I see the cabin-window bright;
I see the sailor at the wheel.
'Thou bringest the sailor to his wife,
And travelled men from foreign lands;
And letters unto trembling hands;
And thy dark freight, a vanished life.
'So bring him: we have idle dreams:
This look of quiet flatters thus
Our home-bred fancies; O, to us,
The fools of habit, sweeter seems
'To rest beneath the clover sod,
That takes the sunshine and the rains,
Or where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God,
'Than if with thee the roaring wells
Should gulf him fathom deep in brine;
And hands so often clasped in mine
Should toss with tangle and with shells.'[25]
Doubtless many of the processes adopted by blind affection and
superstitious homage, to rescue the poor human casket from destruction,
are grotesque and undesirable. Had Segato, the discoverer of a chemical
method of petrifying flesh, survived to publish the secret, it would be
chiefly for anatomical purposes that we should appreciate his invention;
there is something revolting in the artificial conservation of what, by
the law of Nature, should undergo elemental dissolution; and it is but a
senseless homage to cling to the shattered chrysalis when the winged
embryo has soared away:
'All' ombra de' cipressi e dentro l'urne
Confortate di pianto, è forse il sonno
Delia morte men duro?'[26]
Nature sometimes is a conservative mother even of mortal lineaments; in
glacier or tarn, in _tuffo_ and limestone fossils, she keeps for ages the
entire relics of humanity. The fantastic array of human bones in the
Capuchin cells at Palermo and Rome; the eyeless, shrunken face of Carlo
Borromeo embedded in crystal, jewels, and silk, beneath the Milan
cathedral; the fleshless figure of old Jeremy Bentham in the raiment of
this working-day world; the thousand spicy wrappings which enfold the
exhumed mummy whose exhibition provoked Horace Smith's facetious
rhymes,--these, and such as these, poor attempts to do vain honour to our
clay, are not less repugnant to the sentiment of death, in its religious
and enlightened manifestation, than the promiscuous and careless putting
out of sight of the dead after battle and in the reign of pestilence, or
the brutal and irreverent disposal of the bodies of the poor in the
diurnal pits of the Naples Campo Santo. More accordant with our sense of
respect to what once enshrined an immortal spirit, and stood erect and
free, even in barbaric manhood, is the adjuration of the bard:--
'Gather him to his grave again,
And solemnly and softly lay,
Beneath the verdure of the plain,
The warrior's scattered bones away;
The soul hath quickened every part,--
That remnant of a martial brow,
Those ribs that held the mighty heart,
That strong arm,--strong no longer now!
Spare them, each mouldering relic spare,
Of God's own image; let them rest,
Till not a trace shall speak of where
The awful likeness was impressed.'
Yet there are many and judicious reasons for preferring cremation to
inhumation; the prejudice against the former having doubtless originated
among the early Christians, in their respect for patriarchal entombment,
practised by the Jews, and their natural horror at any custom which
savoured of heathenism. But there is actually no religious obstacle, and,
under proper arrangement, no public inconvenience, in the burning of the
dead. It is, too, a process which singularly attracts those who would save
the remains of those they love from the possibility of desecration, and
anticipate the ultimate fate of the mortal coil 'to mix for ever with the
elements;' at all events, there can be no rational objection to the
exercise of private taste, and the gratification of personal feeling on
this point. 'I bequeath my soul to God,' said Michael Angelo, in his terse
will, 'my body to the earth, and my possessions to my nearest kin;'--and
this right to dispose of one's mortal remains appears to be instinctive;
though the indignation excited by any departure from custom would indicate
that, in popular apprehension, the privilege so rarely exercised is
illegally usurped.
The outcry in a Western town, a few years ago, when cremation was resorted
to, at the earnest desire of a deceased wife; and the offence taken and
expressed in an Eastern city, when it became known that a distinguished
surgeon, from respect to science, had bequeathed his skeleton to a medical
college; evidence how little, among us, is recognized the right of the
living to dispose of their remains, and the extent to which popular
ignorance and individual prejudice are allowed to interfere in what good
sense and good feeling declare an especial matter of private concern. Yet
that other than the ordinary modes of disposing of human relics are not
absolutely repugnant to endearing associations, may be inferred from the
poetic interest which sanctions to the imagination the obsequies of
Shelley. Although it was from convenience that the body of that ideal
bard, so misunderstood, so humane, so 'cradled into poesy by wrong,' was
burned, yet the lover of his spiritual muse beholds in that lonely pyre,
blazing on the shores of the Mediterranean, an elemental destruction of
the material shrine of a lofty and loving soul, accordant with his
aspiring, isolated, and imaginative career.[27]
Vain, indeed, have proved the studious precautions of Egyptians to
conserve from decay and sacrilege the relics of their dead. Not only has
'mummy become merchandise,' in the limited sense of the English moralist;
the traffic of the Jews in their gums and spices, the distribution of
their exhumed forms in museums, and the use of their cases for fuel, is
now superseded by commerce in their cerements for the manufacture of
paper; and it is a startling evidence of that human vicissitude from which
even the shrouds of ancient kings are not exempt, that recently, in one of
the new towns of this continent, a newspaper was printed on sheets made
from the imported rags of Egyptian mummies.
Of primitive and casual landmarks, encountered on solitary moors and
hills, the cairn and the Alpine cross affect the imagination with a sense
alike of mortality and tributary sentiment, even more vividly than the
elaborate mausoleum, from the rude expedients and the solemn isolation;
while the beauty of cathedral architecture is hallowed by ancestral
monuments. Of all Scott's characters, the one that most deeply enlists our
sympathies, through that quaint pathos whereby the Past is made eloquent
both to fancy and affection, is Old Mortality renewing the
half-obliterated inscriptions on the gravestones of the Covenanters, his
white hair fluttering in the wind as he stoops to his melancholy task, and
his aged pony feeding on the grassy mounds. Even our practical Franklin
seized the first leisure from patriotic duties, on his visit to England,
in order to examine the sepulchral tablets which bear the names of his
progenitors.