The Entrance Is Handsome, And The Numerous Walls And
Carriage-Drives Are Laid With Fine Gravel, And Beautifully Swept.
We drove
to see the most interesting objects, and the coachman seemed to take a
peculiar pride in pointing them out.
This noble burying-ground has some
prettily diversified hill and dale scenery, and is six miles round. The
timber is very fine, and throughout art has only been required as an
assistance to nature. To this cemetery most of the dead of New York are
carried, and after "life's fitful fever," in its most exaggerated form,
sleep in appropriate silence. Already several thousand dead have been
placed here in places of sepulture varying in appearance from the most
splendid and ornate to the simplest and most obscure. There are family
mausoleums, gloomy and sepulchral looking, in the Grecian style; family
burying-grounds neatly enclosed by iron or bronze railings, where white
marble crosses mark the graves; there are tombs with epitaphs, and tombs
with statues; there are simple cenotaphs and monumental slabs, and
nameless graves marked by numbers only.
One very remarkable feature of this cemetery is the "Potter's Field," a
plot containing several acres of ground, where strangers are buried. This
is already occupied to a great extent. The graves are placed in rows close
together, with numbers on a small iron plate to denote each. Here the
shipwrecked, the pestilence-stricken, the penniless, and friendless are
buried; and though such a spot cannot fail to provoke sad musings, the
people of New York do not suffer any appearances of neglect to accumulate
round the last resting-place of those who died unfriended and alone.
Another feature, not to be met with in England, strikes the stranger at
first with ludicrous images, though in reality it has more of the
pathetic. In one part of this cemetery there are several hundred graves of
children, and these, with most others of children of the poorer class,
have toys in glass cases placed upon them. There are playthings of many
kinds, woolly dogs and lambs, and little wooden houses, toys which must be
associated in the parents' minds with those who made their homes glad, but
who have gone into the grave before them. One cannot but think of the
bright eyes dim, the merry laugh and infantine prattle silent, the little
hands, once so active in playful mischief, stiff and cold; all brought so
to mind by the sight of those toys. There is a fearful amount of mortality
among children at New York, and in several instances four or five buried
in one grave told with mournful suggestiveness of the silence and
desolation of once happy hearths.
There are a few very remarkable and somewhat fantastic monuments. There is
a beautiful one in white marble to the memory of a sea-captain's wife,
with an exact likeness of himself, in the attitude of taking an
observation, on the top. An inscription to himself is likewise upon it,
leaving only the date of his death to be added.
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