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appears at first glance an idle and a vain thing idle 

 and vain, too, the exhumation and shifting of moulder- 

 ing bones, the arrangement of the dead according to 

 parish and family. But dust has its affinities for dust, 

 and not wholly illusory was the poet's consolation that 



From his ashes may be made the violet of his native land. 



By strong but invisible bonds inanimate acres 

 hold fast to the handful from them that a life has 

 gathered and held together. Men have commanded 

 their urns to be emptied in mid- ocean, and have 

 bequeathed their ashes to the vagrant wind, but 

 Nature's most ardent and strenuous lovers cannot be 

 forced into an abstract passion, or estranged from 

 the kith and kin that shared their early susten- 

 ance. The grass with its springtide brightness and 

 the playmates that rejoice in it, the oak and the tall 

 poplar, the green corn and the lark that rises singing 

 from its midst, are they not all foster children of the 

 same nurse ? When my tenancy is expired, and earth 

 reclaims the body I have borrowed from her, shall 

 it not be returned to the woods that have rustled to 

 make me music, to the daisies that have known my 

 feet, to the woodbine and primrose that gave me their 

 earliest blooms rather than to alien flowers ? 



Artificial modes of life and thought affect this 

 passion for home this passion that is deeper than 

 any philosophy but to a very small degree. Faiths 

 alter, and the fashion of them, so that instead of 



