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PARK AND CC/nCTCRY 
WINDOW IN CHAPIN MEMOKIAL CHAPEL, HOPE CEMETERY, SPRINGFIELD, MASS. 
Stained Glass in Monumental Work, 
Of recent years windows have been frequently 
placed in mausoleums and vaults, but owing to 
their more customary use in churches, this most im- 
portant and beautiful form of memorial has scarcely 
been recognized as a feature of cemetery decora- 
tion. My attention was drawn to the fact on no- 
ticing in Woodlawn Cemetery a mausoleum entirely 
without ornament and beautiful simply from its pro- 
portions and the exquisite finish of the plain white 
stone. A great iron gate closed the entrance and 
through it one saw the warm bright sunshine, trans- 
mitted by a stained glass window, at the back, fall- 
ing in mosaic on the floor. The window was 
neither a large nor an expensive one, but a conven- 
tional design in cathedral glass, and yet it filled the 
interior like a glorifying presence and as I went on 
to other monuments their gloom and vacancy im- 
pressed me as it had never done before. The trees 
were bare, and among their branches the points of 
numberless obelisks bristled, dwarfing one another 
and destroying the sentiment which before all others 
should pervade a cemetery — peace. 
Why this pagan form has found such favor would 
be hard to tell. Perhaps some years ago when the 
Christian religions were not in such kindly fellow- 
ship as the teachings of Christ admit, a Protestant 
prejudice against anything which might seem to 
border on Romishness led to the adoption of Egyp- 
tian monuments and Grecian urns and many 
other things which, while excellent in themselves, 
are associated in other minds with customs far re- 
moved from those of the present day, and which 
might well give the coming centuries a curiously 
erroneous notion of our faiths and thoughts. And 
time will not lend to these more ambitious monu- 
ments the charm that we find in the old country 
churchyards where the breeze bends the tall silken 
timothy and the crumbling headstones lean over 
the forgotten graves that someway never seem as 
much forgotten as these neatly tended plots Nat- 
urally enough an object belonging to a certain place 
or period never justified itself when disassociated 
from the conditions which created it, and I never 
see Cleopatra’s needle rising battered and uncouth 
from its graded velvet sward in Central Park with- 
out wishing that America would send it back to its 
own Nile, its Egypt and its sandhills. And yet 
when we look at the greater part of the sculptured 
monuments erected thirty years ago, we cannot but 
feel grateful toward the inherent taste of those who 
avoided them by choosing the plain shaft. Now, 
however, we have sculptors whom other countries 
are delighted to honor, we have bronze foundries 
fitted to cast the finest work, artisans to follow out 
the most exquisite design in stone, and it remains 
only for our people to acquire a more trained ap- 
preciation of the difference between good and 
mediocre work, — for that which is very very bad 
usually announces itself. But it is generally con- 
ceded that perfect painting comes before perfect 
sculpture in the evolution of art, and it seems more 
than probable that it will be through the colorist 
that the general standard of memorial work will be 
improved until our burial grounds will contain 
much that is finest of our nation’s art. No great 
buildings, no monuments in public parks gauge the 
development of a country as do its cemeteries. 
There alone is found record hopelessly true of the 
individual taste of all its people, and it is a fact full 
of promise that the newer parts of Greenwood and 
Woodlawn are so much finer than the old. 
In Greenwood there are, beside the well known 
Whitney Chapel, a number of mausoleums, and of 
vaults whose catacombs alone run underground, in 
which stained glass windows have been placed, and 
