Is not thus the fallacy of the
corruption of Nature exposed, and the lie against our Creator's wisdom,
love, and goodness dragged into noonday light?"
* * * * *
But it is time to recommence our rambles through the City of the Dead.
Right here I come across on a tombstone,--"All our children. Emma, aged
1 mo. 23 days. John, 3 years 5 days. Anna, aged 1 year 1 mo." As a
physiologist, I might make some very instructive comments upon this; but
I forbear.
And here, upon another, a few rods farther on, is an epitaph in verse:--
(FIRST VERSE.)
"Calm be her slumbers near kindred are sighing,
A husband deplores in deep anguish of heart,
Beneath the cold earth _unconsciously lying_,
No murmur can reach her, no tempest can start."
(SECOND VERSE.)
"Calm be her sleep as the silence of even
When hearts unto deep invocation give birth.
With a prayer she has _knelt at the portal of heaven_
And found the admission she hoped for on earth_."
Not to speak of the "poetry" just here, how charmingly consistent with
each other are the ideas contained in the passages I have italicized! In
the first verse, you observe, the inmate is sleeping unconscious beneath
the ground: in the second verse, she has ascended to heaven and
found admittance to mansions in the skies!--A similar confusion and
contradiction of ideas occur in most of the epitaphs I see.
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