A Haunter of Churchyards

I said a little while ago that when staying at a village I am apt to
become a haunter of its churchyard; but I go not to it in the spirit of
our well-beloved Mr. Pecksniff. He, it will be remembered, was
accustomed to take an occasional turn among the tombs in the graveyard
at Amesbury, or wherever it was, to read and commit to memory the pious
and admonitory phrases he found on the stones, to be used later as a
garnish to his beautiful, elevating talk. The attraction for me, which
has little to do with inscriptions, was partly stated in the last
sketch, and I may come to it again by-and-by.

Nevertheless, I cannot saunter or sit down among these memorials
without paying some attention to the lettering on them, and always with
greatest interest in those which time and weather and the corrosive
lichen have made illegible. The old stones that are no longer visited,
on which no fresh-gathered flower is ever laid, which mark the last
resting-places of the men and women who were once the leading members
of the little rustic community, and are now forgotten for ever, whose
bones for a century past have been crumbling to dust. And the
children's children, and remoter descendants of these dead, where are
they? since one refuses to believe that they inhabit this land any
longer. Under what suns, then, by what mountains and what mighty
rivers, on what great green or sun-parched plains and in what roaring
cities in far-off continents? They have forgotten; they have no memory
nor tradition of these buried ones, nor perhaps even know the name of
this village where they lived and died. Yet we believe that something
from these same dead survives in them--something, too, of the place,
the village, the soil, an inherited memory and emotion. At all events
we know that, wheresoever they may be, that their soul is English
still, that they will hearken to their mother's voice when she calls
and come to her from the very ends of the earth.

As to the modern stones with inscriptions made so plain that you can
read them at a distance of twenty yards, one cultivates the art of not
seeing them, since if you look attentively at them and read the dull
formal inscription, the disgust you will experience at their extreme
ugliness will drive you from the spot, and so cause you to miss some
delicate loveliness lurking there, like a violet "half hidden from the
eye." But I need not go into this subject here, as I have had my say
about it in a well-known book--Hampshire Days.

The stones I look at are of the seventeenth, eighteenth and first half
of the nineteenth centuries, for even down to the fifties of last
century something of the old tradition lingered on, and not all the
stones were shaped and lettered in imitation