DR CLARKE OX THE YEW-TREE. 



131 



In a similar spirit, is the not unfrequent German epitaph, 

 ♦' Dein grab soil nicht ohre Blumen seyn wenn es auch deino Tage 

 waren." — " Though thy path of life was strewn with thorns, thy 

 grave shall be decked with flowers." It would be thought a kind 

 of profanation to pluck flowers so planted and so growing. They 

 are dedicated to the dead. " Der Schmuck eines Grabes gehiirt 

 dem Todten." Whilst on this topic I may mention an epitaph 

 at Gottingen from Klopstock, which struck me by its originality 



and beauty — 



" Sftat gesaet von 6ott 



Am Tage der Garben zu reifen." 



" Seed 80>vn by God to ripen on the day of the Resurrection." 

 But I was not a little pleased to find this idea anticipated by our 

 own Jeremy Taylor, whose mind was so eniiched with all learn- 

 ing, and so filled with images of beauty, that, like the householder 

 in Scripture, he could bring out of his treasure things new and 

 old. He describes a churchyard as *' The field of God sown with 

 the seeds of the resurrection." It is curious to observe how 

 every nation seems to have shunned, by metaphor or circumlocu- 

 tion, the naked ideas of death and the grave. By the Greeks, the 

 burial-ground was termed the place of sleep, an idea and phrase 

 borrowed by the Romans ; Sleep and Death being, in the graceful 

 mythology of Greece, twin sisters, and daughters of Night. The 

 Italians call it Campo Santo, or holy ground. The Pisan crusaders 

 returning from Palestine, thought they could bring no more pre- 

 cious pledge of the Holy War than some of the earth of Calvary, 

 in which they and their children might finally repose. This 

 earth was deposited and enclosed at Pisa, and called the Campo 

 Santo, and, from this original, places of sepulture are generally so 

 termed throughout Italy. The French, after the Romans, call it 

 Cimetiere. The Germans designate it Gottes acker, or the field of 

 God. The English, Churchyard, that is, church earth, or the 

 earth of the house of the Lord. The Americans alone, that 

 literal and unimaginative people, who affect to despise the usages 

 of antiquity, solely because they belong to the past, call it plainly 

 and without disguise. Graveyard, 



