Tombstone

“ Every tombstone is engraved with a catalogue of human virtues; and idlers wandering round about our country churches, find themselves surrounded by the ashes of fond husbands, innocent angels, and adored wives. ”

“ You may see a large and expensive tombstone, shining white in the distance, with all the air of aristocratic self-importance which man’s pride can lend to death; but when you approach, it is railed off with bamboo and barbed wire which might have been picked off a rubbish-heap. ”

“ I notice that an old tombstone seems to set you meditating. So it does me. When I look at an ancient monument, and especially an old headstone, I find myself almost unconsciously retracing the years to the date that is written on the stone. ”

“ In an English churchyard, the tombstone either preaches at you—and that with such an offensive dogmatism as none but a dead man would venture to assume—or it presents a fulsome collection of laudatory phrases, shovelled upon the dead with as much thought and consideration as were the dirt and clay upon his coffin. ”

“ I will not think of my burial again.——Melchior will lay a wreath on my coffin. Pastor Kahlbauch will console my parents. Rector Sonnenstich will cite examples from history.——It is possible that I shall not have a tombstone. I had wanted a snow-white marble urn on a pedestal of black syenite.——Thank God, I shall not miss them. Monuments are for the living, not for the dead. ”

“ That setting up of the tombstone by poor old Joan was a very heavy blow to the inquisitive."
"But, my dear, that did not make the poor girl dead a bit more than she was dead before."
"Miranda, you do not understand the world. The evidence of a tombstone is the strongest there can be, and beats that of fifty living witnesses. ”

“ Emigravit is the inscription on the tombstone where he lies; Dead he is not, but departed,—for the artist never dies. ”

“ Thus, all the coffins which contained the bodies of martyrs, nobles, prelates, or kings, were exposed to the view of the faithful, and served for tombs, so that these illustrious persons were not, in the true sense of the term, interred. The stone chest in which the body was placed being both a coffin and a funeral monument, was not hidden beneath a tombstone, but remained visible in a church—not in a sepulchral cave, but above ground, often, indeed, raised upon columns. ”

“ The adventurers, however, discovered mineral treasures, of enormous extent, started a town, and, as a derisive answer to their prophetic friend, called it Tombstone. This is the story of only a few years. Tombstone is now a prosperous community, and has a daily paper. ”

“ When I look upon the Tombs of the Great, every Emotion of Envy dies in me; when I read the Epitaphs of the Beautiful, every inordinate Desire goes out; when I meet with the Grief of Parents upon a Tombstone, my Heart melts with Compassion; when I see the Tomb of the Parents themselves, I consider the Vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow: ”

“ It is not customary to erect a tombstone soon after a burial; the mound is sufficient to indicate to the family the exact position of the grave, and all necessary dates and names are carefully entered on the pedigree-scroll or inscribed on the ancestral tablets. In front of each grave will often be seen a small stone altar or pedestal or a stone incense-jar. Here are offered up the ancestral sacrifices at the festivals of Ch'ing-Ming and the first of the tenth moon. ”

“ It is sometimes a difficult task, in judging of antiquities, to make a sufficient allowance for the spirit of imitation. There is nothing certainly more natural than that a new tombstone should be made after the fashion of time-honoured monuments, the pride of the graveyard in which it is to be placed. ”

“ Then go into any churchyard and observe the tombstones. We are children of the men who set up menhirs, and we do the same thing to this day, though the stones we erect are mean and small compared with the great standing monoliths they set up to their dead.
In many of the churches around the moor are monuments that derive from the cromlech and kistvaens as certainly as does the modern tombstone from the menhir. The graveyard of Sourton was rich in these great slabs standing on four supporters. ”

“ Nothing but a little grass mound marks the place of his rest. In time, the tombstones will rise round it. And the people who come after us will look and wonder at the nameless grave.
As I have told you, for six hours before his death his sufferings ceased. ”

“ However uncouth they may be in design or expression, they must be tolerated for their age. It cannot be denied that some of them try our patience, in the epitaphs even more perhaps than in the carvings, and "merely mock whom they were meant to honour." Two out of a vast number may be selected as painful evidences of a departed century's tombstone ribaldry. The first, from a village near Bath, is a deplorable mixture of piety and profanity, sentiment and vulgarity ”

“ Tombstones, on which the inscriptions are hidden in green obliteration, or that are mouldering, or falling to a side, are close to others which last week were brushed by the chisel;—constant renovation and constant decay—vain attempts to adhere to memory—and oblivion, now baffled and now triumphant, smiling among all the memorials of human affection, as they keep continually crumbling away into the world of undistinguishable dust and ashes. ”

“ The making of even “high art” goods must rest the 101nerves, like the “perpetual motion” of my Scotch mother’s knitting needles!
In the distance the cemetery looked like a large field, glaring with poppies and cornflowers that it was puzzling to find so late in this cold climate. As we approached, however, the picturesque scene proved to come from dyed wool left to dry on the tombstones, which were, themselves, of a turban-like shape. ”

“ These are wooden planks cut in the shape of tombstones and roughly painted. Sometimes they bear also the image of a saint. They are erected—often in a row of thirty and more—on the roadside, in fields and meadows, near chapels and crucifixes, in the village streets—in short, everywhere; they are even nailed to houses and barns. They do not mark burial-places, as might be supposed. As soon as a person has died the corpse is put on a board, and there it lies in state until it is put into the coffin shortly before the funeral. ”

“ So far as one could observe, looking at the gravestones in the new churchyard, the people who died there died rather thoughtlessly and mechanically, and as if nobody cared very much. Of course, when one thinks a little further, one knows that this cannot be true, and that the men and the women who gathered by these glib, trim, capable-looking modern tombstones were as full of love and tenderness and reverence before their dead as the others were—but the lines on the stones give no sign. One never stops to read an epitaph on one of them ”

“ These prattlings of sorrow have their happy significance, since they show the universal forgiveness that follows even the worst and basest of mankind to the grave. But viewed as historical records, tombstones are sadly erring guides. They tell histories of men, written by their mistresses or their children. ”

“ Accompanied by the gamekeeper's daughter I set out, and as we passed along we found the graveyard gate open, and the tombstones gilded by the light of the setting sun.
"Since my childhood I have always had a pleasure in reading inscriptions and epitaphs on tombstones. I am moved when one tells of a young man or woman carried off in the bloom of youth, and I feel a sort of melancholy pleasure if it concerns a person who had reached advanced age. ”

“ The graveyard is one of the oddest in the kingdom, presenting long rows of huge tombstones, twelve or fifteen feet high, usually painted of a muddy cream color, each one serving for an entire family, and recording the trades or professions as well as the names and ages of the deceased. ”

“ What us there flattering, amusing, or edifying in their carving your name on a tombstone, then time rubbing off the inscription together with the gilding? ”

“ But we know instances, especially in and around London, where good work has been done by judiciously thinning out the crop of tombstones, clearing away the least presentable features of the place, and making the ground prim with flower-beds and borders. ”

“ Nor must it be imagined that the tombstones in all graveyard gardens have necessarily to be moved. It is only where they are standing so thickly that the ground cannot be laid out otherwise. In some places, such as Spa Fields, not a single gravestone existed when it came into the hands of the Association ”

“ If the body is buried (which only happens when the deceased is friendless, or too poor to pay the expenses of cremation) , the head is always placed pointing to the north. The tombstones are ordinarily about three feet high ”

“ So said Hester Prynne, and glanced her sad eyes downward at the scarlet letter. And, after many, many years, a new grave was delved, near an old and sunken one, in that burial-ground beside which King’s Chapel has since been built. It was near that old and sunken grave, yet with a space between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had no right to mingle. Yet one tombstone served for both. All around, there were monuments carved with armorial bearings ”

“ I don’t know whether it is that I am built wrong, but I never did seem to hanker after tombstones myself. I know that the proper thing to do, when you get to a village or town, is to rush off to the churchyard, and enjoy the graves; but it is a recreation that I always deny myself. I take no interest in creeping round dim and chilly churches behind wheezy old men, and reading epitaphs. Not even the sight of a bit of cracked brass let into a stone affords me what I call real happiness. ”

“ I do not want to see tombs—not your tombs. Why should I? We have graves of our own, our family has. Why my uncle Podger has a tomb in Kensal Green Cemetery, that is the pride of all that country-side; and my grandfather's vault at Bow is capable of accommodating eight visitors, while my great-aunt Susan has a brick grave in Finchley Churchyard, with a headstone with a coffee-pot sort of thing in bas-relief upon it, and a six-inch best white stone coping all the way round, that cost pounds. When I want graves, it is to those places that I go and revel. ”

“ It is more remarkable as being, so far as I can find, the one solitary instance of an allegorical gravestone among the thousands of gravestones in the vast and carefully guarded burial-place in the City Road. Strictly speaking, death's heads and crossbones are allegorical, but these must be excepted for their very abundance and their lack of novelty. Possibly, also, the lichen, damp, and London climate, which have obliterated many of the inscriptions in this old cemetery, may have been fatal to the low relief which is requisite for figure work of the kind under consideration. ”

“ Say, when beneath your rubbish has been thrown, Some rogue to reputation all unknown— Men's backs being turned—should lift his thieving hand, Efface your name and substitute his own. Whose then would be the monument? To whom Would be the fame? Forgotten in your gloom, Your very name forgotten—ah, my friend, The name is all that's rescued by the tomb. For memory of worth and work we go To other records than a stone can show. These lacking, naught remains; with these The stone is needless for the world will know. Then build your mausoleum if you must, And creep into it with a perfect trust ”

“ No, there is a voice from the tomb sweeter than song. There is a remembrance of the dead to which we turn even from the charms of the living. Oh, the grave! the grave! It buries every error, covers every defect, extinguishes every resentment! From its peaceful bosom spring none but fond regrets and tender recollections. Who can look down upon the grave even of an enemy, and not feel a compunctious throb that he should ever have warred with the poor handful of earth that lies mouldering before him? ”

“ The head-stone, reared by the hand of pious affection, instead of pointing to the remains it was erected to commemorate, stands over the graves of strangers, and we shed our tears over those whom we never knew; while the sexton and the grave-digger grin at us behind the neighbouring tomb-stones, chinking the silver in their pockets, and laughing to think that the paupers whom they shoved into “our” grave on the previous night in a “huggermugger” way should be wept over by the broken-hearted mourner whom they have thus cheated. ”

“ The ostentatious mausoleum may be placed by a broad carriage avenue, where its hollow walls will reverberate to every passing triumph of the tomb; the quiet and the lowly can build their humbler dwelling in some secluded nook, bordered by a narrow path the foot of affection alone will seek to tread, and where no heavier sound will ever echo!
The perpetual right of sepulture may be purchased of the company whose property the place is; and already a number of monuments, in marble and granite, betoken the favour with which this place of "everlasting rest" is viewed. ”

“ It was at the farther end of the [50] cemetery, in a little solitude guarded by a triangle of cypresses that marked the end of the enclosure, a spot where the ground rose considerably above the level of the larger space. Upon this higher level the massive marble tomb—so severely simple, so dazzling in its whiteness—dominated the lower plane, where memorial devices of every shape and form, Gothic cross, and broken column, winged angel, inverted torch, and Grecian urn, seemed poor and trivial by comparison. ”