May no wolfe howle; no screech owle stir
A wing about thy sepulchre!
No boysterous winds or stormes e hither,
To starve or wither
Thy soft sweet earth! but, like a spring,
Love kept it ever ?ourishing.
HERRICK.
IN the course of an excursion through one of the remote ties of England, I had struto one of those cross-roads that lead through the more secluded parts of the try, and stopped oernoon at a village the situation of which was beautifully rural aired. There was an air of primitive simplicity about its inhabitants not to be found in the villages which lie on the great coach-roads. I determio pass the night there, and, having taken an early dinner, strolled out to enjoy the neighb sery.
My ramble, as is usually the case with travellers, soon led me to the church, which stood at a little distance from the village.
Indeed, it was an object of some curiosity, its old tower being pletely overrun with ivy so that only here and there a jutting buttress, an angle of gray wall, or a fantastically carved or peered through the verdant c. It was a lovely evening. The early part of the day had been dark and showery, but iernoon it had cleared up, and, though sullen clouds still hung overhead, yet there was a broad tract of golden sky in the west, from which the setting sun gleamed through the dripping leaves and lit up all Nature into a melancholy smile. It seemed like the parting hour of a good Christian smiling on the sins and sorrows of the world, and giving, in the serenity of his dee, an assurahat he will rise again in glory.
I had seated myself on a half-suombstone, and was musing, as one is apt to do at this sober-thoughted hour, on past ses and early friends--on those who were distant and those who were dead--and indulging in that kind of melancholy fang which has in it something sweeter even than pleasure. Every now and theroke of a bell from the neighb tower fell on my ear; its tones were in unison with the se, and, instead of jarring, chimed in with my feelings; and it was some time before I recollected that it must be tolling the knell of some enant of the tomb.
Presently I saw a funeral train moving across the village green; it wound slowly along a lane, was lost, and reappeared through the breaks of the hedges, until it passed the place where I was sitting. The pall was supported by young girls dressed in white, and another, about the age of seventeen, walked before, bearing a chaplet of white ?owers--a token that the deceased was a young and unmarried female. The corpse was followed by the parents.
They were a venerable couple of the better order of peasantry.
The father seemed to repress his feelings, but his ?xed eye, tracted brow, and deeply-furrowed face showed the struggle that assing within. His wife hung on his arm, a aloud with the vulsive bursts of a mothers sorrow.
I followed the funeral into the church. The bier laced in the tre aisle, and the chaplet of white ?owers, with a pair of white gloves, was hung over the seat which the deceased had occupied.
Every one knows the soul-subduing pathos of the funeral service, for who is so fortunate as o have followed some one he has loved to the tomb? But when performed over the remains of innod beauty, thus laid low in the bloom of existence, what be more affeg? At that simple but most solemn sig of the body to the grave-"Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust!"--the tears of t