Longfellow and Brooks
Of all the marbles that fill Westminster Abbey with the glory of great memories, says Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, not one speaks a language so eloquent as the bust of Longfellow. For it announces itself as a pledge of brotherhood recorded in the most sacred shrine of a great nation with which we have sometimes been at variance, but to whose home and race our affection must ever cling, so long as blood is thicker than water. The seemingly feeble link of a sentiment is often stronger than the adamantine chain of a treaty.
It is the province of literature, especially poetry, which deals with the sentiments common to humanity, to obliterate the geographical and political boundaries of nations, and make them one in feeling. The beautiful tribute of Englishmen to an American poet, giving him a place in their proudest mausoleum, by the side of their bravest, best, noblest, greatest, is a proof of friendship and esteem so genuine that it overleaps all the barriers of nationality.
To this tribute to Longfellow is now added a gracious memorial, by English people, of Phillips Brooks, in St. Margaret’s, Westminster, the parish church of the House of Commons. Dean Farrar, in speaking of the bishop’s unique personality, said he was “of all modern ecclesiastics the most famous.” The memorial window, remarkable for its highly artistic features, presents several impressive scenes, with texts representing the joyful, cheerful side of Christianity. Underneath are the words, “In Memory of Phillips Brooks, D.D., Bishop of Massachusetts, honored and beloved, A. D. 1894,” and again, below this, is a quatrain in Latin elegiacs, written by the late Dr. Benson, formerly Archbishop of Canterbury:
Fervidus eloquio, sacra fortissimus arte,
Suadendi, gravibus vera Deumque Viris,
Quæreris ad sedem populari voce regendam,
Quæreris—ad sedem rapte Domumque Dei.
Thus freely Englished by the son of the writer:
True priest of God whose glowing utterance stayed
The failing feet, the heart that was afraid,
Pastor and Friend, beloved, most desired,
Thy people called thee, but thy God required.
Tennyson’s epitaph on Sir John Franklin, the Arctic explorer, in Westminster Abbey:
Non hic nauta iacet fortissimus: ossa nivalis
Arctos habet, sed pars non moritura viri
Navigat inmensum auspiciis melioribus æquor
Limina non nostri dum petit alta poli.
[Not here: the white North has thy bones, and thou,
Heroic sailor-soul,
Art passing on thine happier voyage now,
Toward no earthly pole.]
Fixed in the wall of Freshwater Church as a memorial to Lionel Tennyson is a marble tablet on which these lines are inscribed:
Truth for truth is truth he worshipt, being true as he was brave;
Good for good is good he follow’d, yet he looked beyond the grave;
Truth for truth, and good for good! The good, the true, the pure, the just!
Take the charm “for ever” from them, and they crumble into dust.
The signature “A. T.” is not needed to show whose was the pen that traced them.
Sir Vincent Eyre, a retired Major-General of the Indian army, found the grave and tombstone of Keats, the poet, who died in Rome in 1821, and who was buried in the old cemetery for English Protestants, wholly neglected. The inscription on the stone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” was almost illegible from dirt and decay. He made a collection, repaired the grave, cleaned the tombstone, and placed a medallion of Keats on the wall near the grave, with the following acrostic:
Keats, if thy cherished name be writ in water,
Each drop has fallen from a mourner’s cheek,
A sacred tribute such as heroes seek,
Though oft in vain, for dazzling deeds of slaughter,
Sleep on not less for epitaph so meek.
Longfellow on Bayard Taylor:
Dead he lay among his books,
The peace of God was in his looks.
As the statues in the gloom
Watch o’er Maximilian’s tomb,
So these volumes from their shelves.
Ah! his hand will never more
Turn their storied pages o’er!
Never more his lips repeat
Songs of theirs, however sweet!
Let the lifeless body rest,
He is gone who was its guest;
Gone as travellers haste to leave
An inn, nor tarry until eve.
Traveller, in what realms afar,
In what planet, in what star,
In what vast aerial space
Shines the light upon thy face?
In what gardens of delight
Rest thy weary feet to-night?
Among the shortest epitaphs are “Resurgam,” “Miserrimus,” and Shelley’s “Cor cordium;” and, in a very different spirit, such as Thorpe’s Corpse, Finis Maginnis. A military epitaph on the tomb of a Captain in the cemetery of Montparnasse:
“Carry arms! Present arms!
“In place! Rest!...”
In the Witchurch graveyard, Dorsetshire, is this concatenation of names:
Arabella Jennerenna Raqustenna Amabel Grunter, daughter of John Grunter.
In Axminster church-yard:
Anna Maria Matilda Sophia Johnson Thompson Kettelby Rundell.