GRAVESTONES : 



ESTHETICALLY AND ETHICALLY CONSIDERED. 

 By Irving Browne. 



[Read before the Albany Institute, June 29, 1880.] 



Our Puritan forefathers cared little to assuage the natural terrors 

 of death. Indeed, one is almost disposed to think that they deemed 

 it a solemn duty to enhance them. At all events, their neglect of the 

 resting-places of their dead was well fitted to make one content to 

 live. A Xew England burying-ground, even thirty or forty years 

 ago, was the most neglected spot in the village. The thought of being 

 laid away in such a place added a new terror to death, almost as keen 

 as the little man's threat to the great man that he would write his 

 biography if he survived him. The graveyard was always placed 

 where nothing would grow, and the only cultivation it ever received 

 was the digging of an occasional grave. The ground was usually 

 given by some citizen, who had found, by experiment, that he could 

 not raise any thing on it, and wanted to escape taxation for it. Its 

 unsightly growth of weeds and grass, its ruinous fences or tumbling 

 walls, its gravestones pitched in every direction by the assaults 

 of the elements and the vaulting ambition of schoolboys, all com- 

 bined to make it repulsive. Every thing like decency in the care of it 

 was regarded as a squandering of money, if not rather irreligious. 

 Any suggestion of improvement met with small favor. God's acre 

 was left to the exclusive care of the proprietor. 



It is related of the late lamented Commodore Fisk, that when ap- 

 pealed to for a subscription to rebuild the fence around the burying- 

 ground in his native town, he declined, saying that he thought it was 

 a useless outlay ; those who were inside couldn't get out, and those 

 who were outside didn't want to get in. This was the feeling of the 

 whole community, though probably few could give so plausible a rea- 

 son for it. 



In ^^"ew England literature, we get two noteworthy descriptions of 

 the burying-grounds of that country. In Twice-Told Tales" — 

 "Chippings with a Chisel " — Hawthorne says: 



" In my walks through the burial-ground of Edgartown — where the 

 dead have laid so long that the soil, once enriched by their decay, has 

 returned to its original barrenness — in that ancient burial-ground I 

 have noticed much variety of monumental sculpture . The elder stones. 



