Ch. 3 - Old Mortality

I

THERE is a certain graveyard, looked upon on the one side by a
prison, on the other by the windows of a quiet hotel; below, under
a steep cliff, it beholds the traffic of many lines of rail, and
the scream of the engine and the shock of meeting buffers mount to
it all day long. The aisles are lined with the inclosed sepulchres
of families, door beyond door, like houses in a street; and in the
morning the shadow of the prison turrets, and of many tall
memorials, fall upon the graves. There, in the hot fits of youth,
I came to be unhappy. Pleasant incidents are woven with my memory
of the place. I here made friends with a plain old gentleman, a
visitor on sunny mornings, gravely cheerful, who, with one eye upon
the place that awaited him, chirped about his youth like winter
sparrows; a beautiful housemaid of the hotel once, for some days
together, dumbly flirted with me from a window and kept my wild
heart flying; and once - she possibly remembers - the wise Eugenia
followed me to that austere inclosure. Her hair came down, and in
the shelter of the tomb my trembling fingers helped her to repair
the braid. But for the most part I went there solitary and, with
irrevocable emotion, pored on the names of the forgotten. Name
after name, and to each the conventional attributions and the idle
dates: a regiment of the unknown that had been the joy of mothers,
and had thrilled with the illusions of youth, and at last, in the
dim sick-room, wrestled with the pangs of old mortality. In that
whole crew of the silenced there was but one of whom my fancy had
received a picture; and he, with his comely, florid countenance,
bewigged and habited in scarlet, and in his day combining fame and
popularity, stood forth, like a taunt, among that company of
phantom appellations. It was then possible to leave behind us
something more explicit than these severe, monotonous and lying
epitaphs; and the thing left, the memory of a painted picture and
what we call the immortality of a name, was hardly more desirable
than mere oblivion. Even David Hume, as he lay composed beneath
that "circular idea," was fainter than a dream; and when the
housemaid, broom in hand, smiled and beckoned from the open window,
the fame of that bewigged philosopher melted like a raindrop in the
sea.

And yet in soberness I cared as little for the housemaid as for
David Hume. The interests of youth are rarely frank; his passions,
like Noah's dove, come home to roost. The fire, sensibility, and
volume of his own nature, that is all that he has learned to
recognise. The tumultuary and gray tide of life, the empire of
routine, the unrejoicing faces of his elders, fill him with
contemptuous surprise; there also he seems to walk