Sacred Meditations and Moral Themes In Verse :: :: University of Virginia Library

A churchyard!—'tis a homely word, yet full
Of feeling; and a sound that o'er the heart
Might shed religion. In the gloom of graves
I read the curse primeval, and the Voice
That wreak'd it seems to whisper by these tombs
Of village quiet, that around me lie
In green humility:—can Life, the dead
Among be musing, nor to me advance
The spirit of her thought? True, Nature wears
No rustic mourning here; in golden play
Her sprightly grass-flowers wave; the random breeze
Hums in the noon, or with yon froward boughs
A murm'ring quarrel wakes; and yet, how oft
In such a haunt, the insuppressive sigh
Is heard, while feelings that may pilot years
To glory, spring from out a minute's gloom!
Mind overcomes me here: amid the hush
Of stately tombs, of dim sepulchral pomp,
And monumental falsehoods, piled o'er men

Whose only worth is in their epitaphs,—
I fear thee not, thou meditating one!
Infinity may blacken round thy dream
Perchance, and words inaudible thy mind
With dread prediction fill;—but worldly gauds
Entice thee; whispered vanities of thought
Arise, and though Life lose her glare awhile,
Ambition tints the moral of the tomb.
'Tis not so here: th' enchanted eye can dwell
On few distinctions, save of differing age;
The heart is free to ponder, and the soul
To be acquainted with itself alone.
And more development of Man is found
In such calm scene, than in the warring rush
Of life.—I watch him thus, and mark
The swelling pomp of immortality
That lifts the soul, and makes Hereafter plain!
Or darkness, from the unapparent dead
That whelms the spirit with a cold despair.

Nature begins; and in the white-rolled shroud
The ghastly nothingness of death appears;—
And then, a knell, Time's world-awaking tongue,
Rings in the soul, and by a new-turned grave
He paints a mourning vision; sees the tears
Telling of many a day's remembered joy
Down cheeks of anguish dropping; and can hear

The careless mutter of the broken clod
Upon his coffin echo. Then, the dream!
The solemn dream! of where a spirit-home
May be, and what the everlasting world?—
Thou mortal! ask the interminated Sky,
The mystic Wind, the ever-murmuring Deep,
And all that night and day around thee bring:—
Doth nought reply! The elements all dumb?
Then ask thy Soul, and God himself replies!