Chippings With A Chisel

Passing a summer, several years since, at Edgartown, on the island of
Martha's Vineyard, I became acquainted with a certain carver of
tombstones, who had travelled and voyaged thither from the interior of
Massachusetts, in search of professional employment. The speculation
had turned out so successful, that my friend expected to transmute
slate and marble into silver and gold, to the amount of at least a
thousand dollars, during the few months of his sojourn at Nantucket
and the Vineyard. The secluded life, and the simple and primitive
spirit which still characterizes the inhabitants of those islands,
especially of Martha's Vineyard, insure their dead friends a longer
and dearer remembrance than the daily novelty and revolving bustle of
the world can elsewhere afford to beings of the past. Yet while every
family is anxious to erect a memorial to its departed members, the
untainted breath of ocean bestows such health and length of days upon
the people of the isles, as would cause a melancholy dearth of
business to a resident artist in that line. His own monument,
recording his disease by starvation, would probably be an early
specimen of his skill. Gravestones, therefore, have generally been an
article of imported merchandise.

In my walks through the burial-ground of Edgartown,--where the dead
have lain so long that the soil, once enriched by their decay, has
returned to its original barrenness,--in that ancient burial-ground I
noticed much variety of monumental sculpture. The elder stones, dated
a century back, or more, have borders elaborately carved with flowers,
and are adorned with a multiplicity of death's-heads, cross-bones,
scythes, hour-glasses, and other lugubrious emblems of mortality, with
here and there a winged cherub to direct the mourner's spirit upward.
These productions of Gothic taste must have been quite beyond the
colonial skill of the day, and were probably carved in London, and
brought across the ocean to commemorate the defunct worthies of this
lonely isle. The more recent monuments are mere slabs of slate, in
the ordinary style, without any superfluous flourishes to set off the
bald inscriptions. But others--and those far the most impressive,
both to my taste and feelings--were roughly hewn from the gray rocks
of the island, evidently by the unskilled hands of surviving friends
and relatives. On some there were merely the initials of a name; some
were inscribed with misspelt prose or rhyme, in deep letters, which
the moss and wintry rain of many years had not been able to
obliterate. These, these were graves where loved ones slept! It is
an old theme of satire, the falsehood and vanity of monumental
eulogies; but when affection and sorrow grave the letters with their
own