Voices From God’s Acre
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.