A KINDNESS for , and a superadded leaning to the old, , weed-grown ones, are not with the cheeriest spirit. A marked distinction is to be between the amateur and the professional haunter of the cœmetrion, the place of sleep. If the pilgrimage among marbles cannot be an matter, pray, sweet reader, keep to the courts of the living. The intolerable pain of meeting with some clear-cut beloved name; the chance of stumbling on some of the departed, under a glass case, or of brushing against the clayey sexton, fresh from his delving,—these are things whose risk one would not willingly run. Therefore stick to , and let thy-131- fastidious eye look with favor at no carven mortuary date that was cut later than under the third of the Georges. If there be a suspicion of , or of landscape gardening in any God's acre as thou passest by, turn thee about to windward. But where there stand, in honest , armorial ensigns, , and cheerful and hour-glasses, labelled (as a child labels his drawing, "This is a cow") with " mori," or the scarcely less admirable truism, "Fugit hora," then enter in, and read that chronicle, with its , which the centuries have written.  
Here is the great dormitory; here sits the little god Harpocrates, swinging on the lotos-leaf, his finger on his lips.
 
"No noyse here
But the toning of a teare."
 
Thousands possess the earth in peace. Are not Spurius Cassius and the Gracchi , when the law prevails at last?
 
How a thing is a monument to the dead, save as expressing the affection of !Cannot the liberal soil absorb, without comment, the vast number of lives so sadly inessential to the world's growth and beauty? It must needs forever be placarded to the stranger, who would fain not be critical concerning the failings of these old hearts, where John Smith lies. It is not the which keeps a memory alive. An is for him whose deeds are graven in the book of life. Many another, who has but elbowed his way selfishly through the world, is laid under all the figures of , and is beholden to nothing better than an to speak him fair. "To be but pyramidally extant," says Sir Thomas Browne, "is a fallacy in duration." A monument, "a stone to a bone," shows the terminus of the journey, and serves merely to mark the through which something , that was dear, has passed away.
 
Think of the gloomy, pessimistic habit of the Puritan , every grave with a grinning , in tracery, when the pagans, ages before, crushed out the material aspects of death beneath chaplets of roses, amaranth, and myrtle; imagery of the insect, leaping to the sun with impetuous wings; poesy full of hopefulness and cheer; and the figure of an torch over the burial pile! It might the sanctity of the to ask which of the two seemed to inherit .
 
Cotton Mather, after his whimsical fashion, pronounces it as the best of Ralph Partridge, the first shepherd of the old Duxborough flock, that being at home by the ecclesiastical setters, he had no defence, neither nor claw, but flight over the ocean; that now being a bird of Paradise, it may be written of him, that he had the loftiness of the eagle and the of the dove. His epitaph is: AVOLAVIT.
 
The most epitaph I ever saw was one of an infant of German extraction, who died, at the notable age of sixteen months: "Beloved and respected by all who knew him." Wellnigh as and as is an in favor of a similar lambkin, yet to be deciphered at Copp's Hill: "He bore a Lingering sicknesse with-134- Patience, and met ye King of Ter............