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.
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