Buried city

“ Artists have made pictures of the ruins, and scholars have written books about them. But it is a great task to uncover a whole city that is buried ten or twelve feet deep. The excavation is not yet finished. Perhaps when you are old men and women the work will be completed, and a whole Roman city will be open to your eyes.
But even as it is to-day, that ghost of a city is among the world’s wonders. There is the thick stone wall that goes all about the town. On its wide top the soldiers used to stand to fight in ancient days. ”

“ Some of the faculty were consulted, in this city, about thirty years ago, upon the question of burying under churches; and, on the strength of the opinion given, a large church, not then finished, was provided with tombs, and the dead have been buried therein, ever since. Now I think the public good would have been advanced, had those doctors set their faces against the selfish proposition. That it is a nuisance, I entertain not the slightest doubt. The practice of burying in their own houses, among the ancients, gave place to burying without the city, or to cremation. ”

“ From year to year, however, bodies are added to those already buried, the disgusting state of overcrowding which I described minutely, with all its evils, shows itself, and then one of two things happens: either the remains of those buried before are ruthlessly dug up by the sexton’s spade and thrown into the mud whenever a new grave is made, or all of the bodies are exhumed and taken away; the soil is parcelled, and the new generation takes possession of the “city of the dead.” ”

“ Whole generations of families are thus buried together, each grave being dug deep enough to hold several coffins one above another, the last one coming to within a few feet of the surface. Now, when one considers the nature of the soil, the closeness of the cemetery to the abodes of the living, the frequency with which the earth is turned over, and the great number of corpses which in a city of the size of Munich must be interred every year, an idea can be formed of the disagreeableness and unhealthiness of the cemeteries. ”

“ When the body is carried through the city to be buried, wooden cottages are built at certain distances by the way, having porches covered with silk, in which the coffin is set down, with a table spread out with bread and wine and delicate viands, that the spirit of the dead may be refreshed with the savour. ”

“ He said, 'The giants' treasure lies in this oven. I will have it.' So he sent men down. But they found only broken pieces of carved marble—no gold."
While the guide talked, the gentleman was tramping about the walls. He peered into all the dark corners. He thrust a stick into every hole. He rubbed the stones with his hands. At last he turned to his guide.
"You are right," he said. "There was once a great city inside these walls. Houses were crowded together on this hill where we stand. Men and women walked the streets of a city that is buried under our feet, but they were not giants. ”

“ And in order that the bodies of the dead should not be thus impiously and barbarously treated and then transported to the places in which, while alive, they had selected to be buried, let them be given sepulture for the time either in the city or the camp or in the place where they have died, or in some neighboring place, so that, when finally their bodies have been reduced to ashes or otherwise, they may be brought to the place where they wish to be buried and there be interred. ”

“ I suppose people still continue to be buried in the cemetery. The greatest upholders of burials in cities are those whose progenitors have been deposited around or within the city churches. If this spacious churchyard stood in a similar position in one of our American cities, I rather suspect that long ere now it would have run the risk of being laid out in building-lots, and covered with warehouses ”

“ A. D. 827.—Charlemagne decreed, that no person should be buried in a church. A. D. 1076.—The Council of Winchester decreed, that no person should be buried in the churches. A. D. 1552.—Latimer, on Saint Luke vii. ii., says, “the citizens of Nain had their burying places without the city; and I do marvel, that London, being so great a city, hath not a burial place without,” &c. A. D. 1565.—Charles Borromeo, the good bishop of Milan, ordered the return to the ancient custom of suburban cemeteries.
Sir Matthew Hale used to say, “churches were made for the living, not for the dead.” ”

“ In the American cemetery are buried some four hundred of our countrymen, soldiers, who died here in 1847. The English and American cemeteries lie together. The poor people of the city, when a death occurs in the family, hire a coffin of the dealers for the purpose of carrying their dead to the burial-place, after which it is returned to the owner, to be again leased for a similar object by some other party. ”

“ THEY bury their dead in vaults, above the ground. These vaults have a resemblance to houses—sometimes to temples; are built of marble, generally; are architecturally graceful and shapely; they face the walks and driveways of the cemetery; and when one moves through the midst of a thousand or so of them and sees their white roofs and gables stretching into the distance on every hand, the phrase 'city of the dead' has all at once a meaning to him. Many of the cemeteries are beautiful, and are kept in perfect order. ”

“ A committee was appointed to visit the spot. Upon drawing near, subdued laughter and the sounds of vulgar merriment arose, from one of the tombs—a light was seen glimmering from below—the strong odor, not of corruption, but of mutton chops, filled the air. Some vagabonds had cleared the tomb, and taken possession, and, with broken coffins for fuel, had found an appetite, among the dead. The occupation of tombs, by the outcasts of society, was common, long before the Christian era.
That the living have been buried, unintentionally, now and then, is undoubtedly true. ”

“ Under the shadow of the graveyard cross or the sombre yew the country folk could stop to whisper a prayer. In far-away times, Gregory the Great had taught that it is more profitable to be buried in the churchyard than in the distant cemetery, because, in the former case, the survivors may frequently behold the sepulchres as they enter the sacred building, and may put forth their petitions. ”

“ In the tombs—which, as I have stated, is the most offensive and mischievous mode of burial. I have already alluded to some instances of traffic, connected with certain tombs, in the Chapel yard. If some plan be not adopted, a new line of business will spring up, in which the members of my profession will figure, to some extent: many of the present owners of tombs will sell out, and move their dead to Mount Auburn, or Forest Hills; and the city tombs will be crammed with as many corpses, as they can hold, by their speculating proprietors. ”

“ Thy footsteps to a slope of green access."
The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. "It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place." ”

“ On the second terrace of the declivity are ten or twelve graves, two of which bear the names of Americans who have died in Rome. A portrait carved in bas-relief, upon one of the slabs, told me, without the inscription, that one whom I had known was buried beneath. The slightly rising mound was covered with small violets, half hidden by the grass. It takes away from the pain with which one stands over the grave of an acquaintance or a friend, to see the sun lying so warm upon it, and the flowers springing so profusely and cheerfully. ”

“ The graveyard is in the middle of a group of pines that bounds the Frau Inspector's garden on that side, and has not been used within the memory of living man. The people here love to make their little burying-grounds in the heart of a wood if they can, and they are often a long way away from the church to which they belong because, while every hamlet has its burying-ground, three or four hamlets have to share a church; and indeed the need for churches is not so urgent as that for graves, seeing that, though we may not all go to church, we all of us die and must be buried. ”

“ Have you ever happened to walk in a burial-ground?
Those little walled-in, quiet corners, overgrown with luscious grass, so small, and yet so ravenous, possess a peculiar dolorous poetry all their own.
Day after day thither are borne new corpses, a whole, immense, living, noisy city has been already borne thither one by one, and lo! the new city which has grown in its place is awaiting its turn—and the little corners remain ever the same, small, still, ravenous. ”

“ And then he was buried in the glorious edifice which he had raised to the service of God, little dreaming that in later days when, fortress and church would be alike in ruins, other men would come with different thoughts, though perhaps not purer aims, and muse within the walls where he had often knelt in prayer, and admire his work, and respect his memory.
Much remains to delight the eye; flying buttresses, clerestory windows, corbels, capitals, and mouldings, some half buried in the rank grass and nettles. And how the clustering masses of ivy heighten the beauty! ”

“ The great alleys of sombre monuments, the weird cedars with their fantastic branches, like arms of a hundred ghosts, quelled and awed these hooting masses of degraded humanity.
The silent majesty of this city of the dead seemed to frown with withering scorn on the passions of the sister city.
Instinctively the rabble was cowed. The cemetery looked dark, dismal, and deserted. The flashes of lightning seemed to reveal ghostlike processions of the departed heroes of France, wandering silently amidst the tombs.
And the populace turned with a shudder away from this vast place of eternal peace. ”

“ Or, can they all be gathered to their fathers in the two old churchyards near to the High Street - retirement into which churchyards appears to be a mere ceremony, there is so very little life outside their confines, and such small discernible difference between being buried alive in the town, and buried dead in the town tombs? ”

“ I had been sent by my New York employers to superintend a branch of their business in a southern city. On the evening of a brilliant Sabbath, as I walked musingly through the cemetery, where thousands of the city's dead had found a calm and sequestered resting place, my attention was drawn to a monumental structure, the character and symbolism of which defied my comprehension. On a grassy mound, in a grove of oak trees, almost concealing it from observation, rose a mausoleum of dark stone, which at the first glance I conjectured to represent a Druidical temple. ”

“ And this is our vaunted ‘Christian burial’ in this new country, with its myriads of broad acres! What shall our children say of us, when they come, perforce, from stress of space, to build their dwellings upon these beds of pestilence?”
THE CREMATORIUM AT BRESCIA.
(From Dr. Pini’s work.)
That is the way we, “the Christian nation par excellence,” treat friendless paupers and criminals. Shame! shame! A dog is more decently interred.
The cemeteries of the city of Brooklyn occupy nearly 2000 acres of land. ”

“ Here we find a rural cemetery in a green field bordered with trees, in which the venerable patriarch buried his wife nearly four thousand years ago, while we, with all our boasted improvements, are in the present day thrusting the dead together in countless thousands, in the very heart of our close and over-crowded cities—where the living have scarcely room enough to breathe, and the dead of to-day are crammed amongst the remains which have been disinterred to give them a short lodgment ”

“ The Orientals, however, have more quiet fortitude than Europeans under afflictions of this sort, and they never allow the plague to interfere with their religious usages. I rode one day round the great burial-ground. The tombs are strewed over a great expanse, among the vast mountains of rubbish (the accumulations of many centuries) which surround the city. The ground, unlike the Turkish “cities of the dead,” which are made so beautiful by their dark cypresses, has nothing to sweeten melancholy, nothing to mitigate the odiousness of death. ”

“ GLIMPSE OF THE SEAMEN'S MONUMENT AND OLD BURIAL-GROUND.
After observing that he should be lucky to get down six feet, the workman told me the grave was destined to receive the remains of an old lady of ninety-four, recently deceased, who, as if fearful her rest might be less quiet in the midst of a generation to which she did not belong, had begged she might be buried here among her old friends and neighbors. ”

“ Such is, by law, the mode of sepulture throughout France: no one can be buried in a church, nor even in his own garden or field, unless at a certain distance from all habitation; and cemeteries, regulated like that of Père la Chaise, are every where provided. ”

“ In the midst of the city lies the ancient burial ground, now long disused but still undisturbed, many acres of uneven land, covered so thickly with graves, and planted so closely with granite and sandstone slabs, that the paths will scarce allow two persons to walk side by side. ”

“ Here we will find old flat stones marking graves made before the days of the Revolution; and some of the famous men we read about are buried in this busy section of lower New York. That will fill in our time until we start back uptown to the hotel," said Mr. Parke. ”

“ A great plague raging in the year of our Lord 1349, this burial-ground was consecrated, wherein, and within the bounds of the present monastery, were buried more than 50,000 bodies of the dead, beside many others thenceforward to the present time: whose souls the Lord have mercy upon. ”