Nathaniel Hawthorne

“ My acquaintance, the sculptor,—he may share that title with Greenough, since the dauber of signs is a painter as well as Raphael,—had found a ready market for all his blank slabs of marble, and full occupation in lettering and ornamenting them. He was an elderly man, a descendant of the old Puritan family of Wigglesworth, with a certain simplicity and singleness, both of heart and mind, which, methinks, is more rarely-found among us Yankees than in any other community of people. ”

“ Wigglesworth confirmed it, that husbands were more faithful in setting up memorials to their dead wives than widows to their dead husbands. I was not ill-natured enough to fancy that women, less than men, feel so sure of their own constancy as to be willing to give a pledge of it in marble. It is more probably the fact, that while men are able to reflect upon their lost companions as remembrances apart from themselves, women, on the other hand, are conscious that a portion of their being has gone with the departed whithersoever he has gone. Soul clings to soul ”

“ The good lady earnestly desired that the proposed monument should be ornamented with a carved border of marine plants, intertwined with twisted sea-shells, such as were probably waving over her lover’s skeleton, or strewn around it, in the far depths of the Pacific. But Mr. Wigglesworth’s chisel being inadequate to the task, she was forced to content herself with a rose, hanging its head from a broken stem. ”

“ Sometimes we would discuss the respective merits of the various qualities of marble, numerous slabs of which were resting against the walls of the shop; or sometimes an hour or two would pass quietly, without a word on either side, while I watched how neatly his chisel struck out letter after letter of the names of the Nortons, the Mayhews, the Luces, the Daggets, and other immemorial families of the Vineyard. Often, with an artist’s pride, the good old sculptor would speak of favorite productions of his skill, which were scattered throughout the village graveyards of New England. ”

“ Every gravestone that you ever made is the visible symbol of a mistaken system. Our thoughts should soar upward with the butterfly,—not linger with the exuviae that confined him. In truth and reason, neither those whom we call the living, and still less the departed, have anything to do with the grave.”
“I never heard anything so heathenish!” said Mr. Wigglesworth, perplexed and displeased at sentiments which controverted all his notions and feelings, and implied the utter waste, and worse, of his whole life’s labor ”

“ The elder stones, dated a century back, or more, have borders elaborately carved with flowers, and are adorned with a multiplicity of death’s-heads, cross-bones, scythes, hour-glasses, and other lugubrious emblems of mortality, with here and there a winged cherub to direct the mourner’s spirit upward. ”

“ In my walks through the burial-ground of Edgartown,—where the dead have lain so long that the soil, once enriched by their decay, has returned to its original barrenness,—in that ancient burial-ground I noticed much variety of monumental sculpture. ”

“ Wigglesworth related with considerable humor. A gentlewoman of the town, receiving news of her husband’s loss at sea, had bespoken a handsome slab of marble, and came daily to watch the progress of my friend’s chisel. One afternoon, when the good lady and the sculptor were in the very midst of the epitaph, which the departed spirit might have been greatly comforted to read, who should walk into the workshop but the deceased himself, in substance as well as spirit! ”