Masses of every shape and size, that lay
Scattered about under the mouldering walls
Of a rough precipice; and some, apart,
In quarters unobnoxious to such chance,
As if the moon had showered them down in spite.
But he repined not. Though the plough was scared 870
By these obstructions, ‘round the shady stones
‘A fertilising moisture,’ said the Swain,
‘Gathers, and is preserved; and feeding dews
‘And damps, through all the droughty summer day
‘From out their substance issuing, maintain
‘Herbage that never fails; no grass springs up
‘So green, so fresh, so plentiful, as mine!’
But thinly sown these natures; rare, at least,
The mutual aptitude of seed and soil
That yields such kindly product. He, whose bed 880
Perhaps yon loose sods cover, the poor Pensioner
Brought yesterday from our sequestered dell
Here to lie down in lasting quiet, he,
If living now, could otherwise report
Of rustic loneliness: that grey-haired Orphan—
So call him, for humanity to him
No parent was—feelingly could have told,
In life, in death, what solitude can breed
Of selfishness, and cruelty, and vice;
Or, if it breed not, hath not power to cure. 890
—But your compliance, Sir! with our request
My words too long have hindered.”
Undeterred,
Perhaps incited rather, by these shocks,
In no ungracious opposition, given
To the confiding spirit of his own
Experienced faith, the reverend Pastor said,
Around him looking; “Where shall I begin?
Who shall be first selected from my flock
Gathered together in their peaceful fold?”
He paused—and having lifted up his eyes 900
To the pure heaven, he cast them down again
Upon the earth beneath his feet; and spake:—
“To a mysteriously-united pair
This place is consecrate; to Death and Life,
And to the best affections that proceed
From their conjunction; consecrate to faith
In him who bled for man upon the cross;
Hallowed to revelation; and no less
To reason’s mandates: and the hopes divine
Of pure imagination;—above all, 910
To charity, and love, that have provided,
Within these precincts, a capacious bed
And receptacle, open to the good
And evil, to the just and the unjust;
In which they find an equal resting-place:
Even as the multitude of kindred brooks
And streams, whose murmur fills this hollow vale,
Whether their course be turbulent or smooth,
Their waters clear or sullied, all are lost
Within the bosom of yon crystal Lake, 920
And end their journey in the same repose!
And blest are they who sleep; and we that know,
While in a spot like this we breathe and walk,
That all beneath us by the wings are covered
Of motherly humanity, outspread
And gathering all within their tender shade,
Though loth and slow to come! A battlefield,
In stillness left when slaughter is no more,
With this compared, makes a strange spectacle!
A dismal prospect yields the wild shore strewn 930
With wrecks, and trod by feet of young and old
Wandering about in miserable search
Of friends or kindred, whom the angry sea
Restores not to their prayer! Ah! who would think
That all the scattered subjects which compose
Earth’s melancholy vision through the space
Of all her climes—these wretched, these depraved,
To virtue lost, insensible of peace,
From the delights of charity cut off,
To pity dead, the oppressor and the opprest; 940
Tyrants who utter the destroying word,
And slaves who will consent to be destroyed—
Were of one species with the sheltered few,
Who, with a dutiful and tender hand,
Lodged, in a dear appropriated spot,
This file of infants; some that never breathed
The vital air; others, which, though allowed
That privilege, did yet expire too soon,
Or with too brief a warning, to admit
Administration of the holy rite 950
That lovingly consigns the babe to the arms
Of Jesus, and his everlasting care.
These that in trembling hope are laid apart;
And the besprinkled nursling, unrequired
Till he begins to smile upon the breast
That feeds him; and the tottering little-one
Taken from air and sunshine when the rose
Of infancy first blooms upon his cheek;
The thinking, thoughtless, school-boy; the bold youth
Of soul impetuous, and the bashful maid 960
Smitten while all the promises of life
Are opening round her; those of middle age,
Cast down while confident in strength they stand,
Like pillars fixed more firmly, as might seem,
And more secure, by very weight of all
That, for support, rests on them; the decayed
And burthensome; and lastly, that poor few
Whose light of reason is with age extinct;
The hopeful and the hopeless, first and last,
The earliest summoned and the longest spared— 970
Are here deposited, with tribute paid
Various, but unto each some tribute paid;
As if, amid these peaceful hills and groves,
Society were touched with kind concern,
And gentle ‘Nature grieved, that one should die;’
Or, if the change demanded no regret,
Observed the liberating stroke—and blessed.
And whence that tribute? wherefore these regards?
Not from the naked ‘Heart’ alone of Man
(Though claiming high distinction upon earth 980
As the sole spring and fountain-head of tears,
His own peculiar utterance for distress
Or gladness)—No,” the philosophic Priest
Continued, “‘tis not in the vital seat
Of feeling to produce them, without aid
From the pure soul, the soul sublime and pure;
With her two faculties of eye and ear,
The one by which a creature, whom his sins
Have rendered prone, can upward look to heaven;
The other that empowers him to perceive 990
The voice of Deity, on height and plain,
Whispering those truths in stillness, which the WORD,
To the four quarters of the winds, proclaims.
Not without such assistance could the use
Of these benign observances prevail:
Thus are they born, thus fostered, thus maintained;
And by the care prospective of our wise
Forefathers, who, to guard against the shocks
The fluctuation and decay of things,
Embodied and established these high truths 1000
In solemn institutions:—men convinced
That life is love and immortality,
The being one, and one the element.
There lies the channel, and original bed,
From the beginning, hollowed out and scooped
For Man’s affections—else betrayed and lost
And swallowed up ‘mid deserts infinite!
This is the genuine course, the a
im, and end
Of prescient reason; all conclusions else
Are abject, vain, presumptuous, and perverse. 1010
The faith partaking of those holy times,
Life, I repeat, is energy of love
Divine or human; exercised in pain,
In strife, and tribulation; and ordained,
If so approved and sanctified, to pass,
Through shades and silent rest, to endless joy.”
NOTES
646 ‘Or rather, as we stand on holy earth,
And have the dead around us.’
Leo. You, Sir, could help me to the history
Of half these graves?
Priest.For eight-score winters past,
With what I’ve witnessed, and with what I’ve heard
Perhaps I might; . . . . .
By turning o’er these hillocks one by one,
We two could travel, Sir, through a strange round;
Yet all in the broad highway of the world.
‘See the Brothers’.
975 ‘And suffering Nature grieved that one should die.’
“Southey’s Retrospect.”
978 ‘And whence that tribute? wherefore these regards?’
The sentiments and opinions here uttered are in unison with
those expressed in the following Essay upon Epitaphs, which was
furnished by me for Mr. Coleridge’s periodical work, “The Friend”;
and as they are dictated by a spirit congenial to that which
pervades this and the two succeeding books, the sympathising
reader will not be displeased to see the Essay here annexed.
ESSAY UPON EPITAPHS
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 has 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 ear
liest 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 seaside; he
buried it, and was honoured throughout Greece for the piety of
Delphi Complete Works of William Wordsworth Page 70
