Customs and Fashions in Old New England Part 26

In many cases the worn gravestone lies forlornly face downward; sometimes,

"The slab has sunk; the head declined, And left the rails a wreck behind.

No names; you trace a '6'--a '7,'

Part of 'affliction' and of 'Heaven.'

And then in letters sharp and clear, You read.--O Irony austere!-- 'Tho' lost to Sight, to Memory dear.'"

"Truly our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly show us how we may be buried in our survivors.'" Still, this neglect and oblivion is just as satisfactory as was the officious "deed without a name" done in orderly Boston, where, in the first half of this century, a precise Superintendent of Graveyards and his army of a.s.sistants--what Charles Lamb called "sapient trouble-tombs"--straightened out mathematically all the old burial-places, levelled the earth, and set in trim military rows the old slate headstones, regardless of the irregular cl.u.s.ters of graves and their occupants.

And there in Boston the falsifying old headstones still stand, fixed in new places, but marking no coffins or honored bones beneath; the only true words of their inscriptions being the opening ones "Here lies," and the motto that they repeat derisively to each other--"As you are now so once was I."

In many communities each family had its own burying-place in some corner of the home farm, sometimes at the foot of garden or orchard. Such is noticeably the case throughout Narragansett; almost every farm has a grave-yard, now generally unused and deserted. Sometimes the burying-place is enclosed by a high mossy stone wall, often it is overgrown with dense sombre firs or hemlocks, or half shaded with airy locust-trees. Beautifully ideal and touching is the thought of these old Narragansett planters resting with their wives and children in the ground they so dearly loved and so faithfully worked for.

A vast similarity of design existed in the early gravestones.

Originality of inscription, carving, size, or material was evidently frowned upon as frivolous, undignified, and eccentric--even disrespectful. A few of the early settlers used freestone or sienite, or a native porphyritic green stone called beech-bowlder. Sandstone was rarely employed, for though easily carved, it as easily yielded to New England frosts and storms. A hard, dark, flinty slate-stone from North Wales was commonly used, a stone so hard and so enduring that when our modern granite and marble monuments are crumbled in the dust I believe these old slate headstones still will speak their warning words of many centuries.

"As I am now so you shall be, Prepare for Death & follow me."

These stones were imported from England ready carved. A high duty was placed on them, and a Boston sea captain endeavored and was caught in the attempt to bring into port, free of duty, for one of his friends, one of these carved slate gravestones, by entering it as a winding-sheet. It is one of the curiosities of New England commercial enterprises, that for many years gravestones should have been imported to New England, a land that fairly bristles with stone and rock thrusting itself through the earth and waiting to be carved.

The Welsh stones were made of a universal pattern--a carved top with a s.p.a.ce enclosing a miserable death's or winged cherub's head as a heading, a border of scrolls down either side of the inscription, and rarely a design at the base. Weeping willows and urns did not appear in the carving at the top until the middle of the eighteenth century, and fought hard with the grinning cherub's head until this century, when both were supplanted by a variety of designs--a clock-face, hour-gla.s.s, etc. Capital letters were used wholly in the inscriptions until Revolutionary times, and even after were mixed with Roman text with so little regard for any printer's law that, at a little distance, many a New England tombstone of the latter part of the past century seems to be carven in hieroglyphics.

Special families in New England seem to have appropriated special verses as epitaphs, evidently because of the rhyme with the surname. Thus the Jones family were properly proud of this family rhyme:

"Beneath this Ston's Int'r'd the Bon's Ah Frail Remains Of Lieut Noah Jones"--

or Mary Jones or William Jones, as the case might be.

The Noyes family delighted in these lines:

"You children of the name of Noyes Make Jesus Christ yo'r only choyse."

The Tutes and Shutes and Roots began their epitaphs thus:

"Here lies cut down like unripe fruit The wife of Deacon Amos Shute."

Gershom Root was "cut down like unripe fruit" at the fully mellowed age of seventy-three.

A curiously incomprehensible epitaph is this, which always strikes me afresh, upon each perusal, as a sort of mortuary conundrum:

"O! Happy Probationer!

Accepted without being Exercised."

Sometimes an old epitaph will be found of such impressive though simple language that it clings long in the memory. Such is this verse of gentle quaintness over the grave of a tender Puritan blossom, the child of an early settler:

"Submit Submitted to her heavenly Kinge Being a flower of that Aeternal Spring Neare 3 years old shee dyed in Heaven to waite The Yeare was sixteen hundred 48."

Another of unusual beauty and sentiment is this:

"I came in the morning--it was Spring And I smiled.

I walked out at noon--it was Summer And I was glad.

I sat me down at even--it was Autumn And I was sad.

I laid me down at night--it was Winter And I slept."

Collections of curious old epitaphs have been made and printed, but seem dull and colorless on the printed page, and the warning words seem to lose their power unless seen in the sad graveyard, where, "silently expressing old mortality," the hackneyed rhymes and tender words are touching from their very simplicity and the loneliness which surrounds them, and for their calm repet.i.tion, on stone after stone, of an undying faith in a future life.

One cannot help being impressed, when studying the almanacs, diaries, and letters of the time, with the strange exaltation of spirit with which the New England Puritan regarded death. To him thoughts of mortality were indeed cordial to the soul. Death was the event, the condition, which brought him near to G.o.d and that unknown world, that "life elysian" of which he constantly spoke, dreamed and thought; and he rejoiced mightily in that close approach, in that sense of touch with the spiritual world. With unaffected cheerfulness he yielded himself to his own fate, with unforced resignation he bore the loss of dearly loved ones, and with eagerness and almost affection he regarded all the gloomy attributes and surroundings of death. Sewall could find in a visit to his family tomb, and in the heart-rending sight of the coffins therein, an "awfull yet pleasing Treat;" while Mr. Joseph Eliot said "that the two days wherein he buried his wife and son were the best he ever had in the world." The accounts of the wondrous and almost inspired calm which settled on those afflicted hearts, bearing steadfastly the Christian belief as taught by the Puritan church, make us long for the simplicity of faith, and the certainty of heaven and happy reunion with loved ones which they felt so triumphantly, so gloriously.