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This indeed has happened in a multitude of places. Who has not seen in ancient churchyards the headstones leaning this way and that, tottering to their fall? Are there not hundreds of proofs that the unclaimed stones have been used, and still serve, for the floors of the churches, and actually for the paving of the churchyard paths?
Blinking old men who are let out of workhouses by the hour, have a tendency to sit on bits of coping stone in these churchyards, leaning with both hands on their sticks and asthmatically gasping. The more depressed class of beggars too, bring hither broken meats, and munch.
Benediction pronounced, the congregation came out of the churchyards in time to greet with delight, not unmixed with a sense of the pathos of it, certain just arrived reinforcements. Four companies of Virginia Military Institute cadets, who, their teachers at their head, had been marched down for the emergency from Lexington, thirty-eight miles away.
Webb's collection of epitaphs, published in 1775, is prefaced by some introductory verses which intimate, without any idea of censure, a condition of things which was clearly not very exceptional in the churchyards of towns and populous villages:
I find many about the City that live near the churchyards solicitous to have the churchyards covered with lime, and I think it is needfull, and ours I hope will be done. To my Lord Chancellor's new house which he is building, only to view it, hearing so much from Mr. Evelyn of it; and, indeed, it is the finest pile I ever did see in my life, and will be a glorious house.
Indeed the cases in which the old churchyards have been the objects of any care whatever are lamentably few, while attempts to preserve the old gravestones are almost unknown. The ordinary experience is to find the churchyard more or less neglected and forgotten, and the grey and aged stones either sinking into the earth or tottering to their fall.
These poems certainly are not deficient in various horrible motives, such as churchyards, nightly crossways, ghosts and vampires; but the repulsive themes do not touch the intrinsic merit of the poet. On the contrary, he treats them from a certain objective distance, and, as it were, with irony. He goes to work with them like an artist, to whom it is an amusement to try anything of the sort.
It is to be regretted that the first inhabitants of the place selected their best and most healthy building sites for the erection of places of worship. Churches and churchyards occupy the hills from whence they obtain their springs of fresh water, and such delicious water!
It was, as we have seen, without taking counsel of the faithful Jemima that the sage recluse of Norwood had yielded to his own fears and Randal's subtle suggestions, in the concise and arbitrary letter which he had written to Violante; but at night, when churchyards give up the dead, and conjugal hearts the secrets hid by day from each other, the wise man informed his wife of the step he had taken.
Autumn in Virginia, especially if one is not too near the mountains, is a season in which greenness sails very close to Christmas, although generally veering away in time to prevent its verdant hues from tingeing that happy day with the gloomy influence of the prophetic proverb about churchyards.
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