The English climate is very unfavorable
to the endurance of memorials in the open air. Twenty years of it
suffice to give as much antiquity of aspect, whether to tombstone or
edifice, as a hundred years of our own drier atmosphere,--so soon do the
drizzly rains and constant moisture corrode the surface of marble or
freestone. Sculptured edges lose their sharpness in a year or two;
yellow lichens overspread a beloved name, and obliterate it while it is
yet fresh upon some survivor's heart. Time gnaws an English gravestone
with wonderful appetite; and when the inscription is quite illegible,
the sexton takes the useless slab away, and perhaps makes a hearthstone
of it, and digs up the unripe bones which it ineffectually tried to
memorialize, and gives the bed to another sleeper. In the Charter-Street
burial-ground at Salem, and in the old graveyard on the hill at Ipswich,
I have seen more ancient gravestones, with legible inscriptions on them,
than in any English church-yard.
And yet this same ungenial climate, hostile as it generally is to the
long remembrance of departed people, has sometimes a lovely way of
dealing with the records on certain monuments that lie horizontally in
the open air. The rain falls into the deep incisions of the letters, and
has scarcely time to be dried away before another shower sprinkles the
flat stone again, and replenishes those little reservoirs.
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