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Updated: June 21, 2025
So studded is it with weatherworn tombstones, inclining at all angles like so many miniature leaning towers of Pisa, ivy-wreathed obelisks and quaintly-fashioned, railed-in monuments, that you can scarcely make out the lower buttresses of the ancient church that stands up from amongst their midst.
It was a relief to the somewhat studied and formal monotony of the well-ordered woodland, every rood, of which had been paced by visitors, keepers, or poachers, to find those decrepit and bending tombstones, lurching at every angle, or deeply sinking into the green sea of forgetfulness around them.
Tall grass bends over the prostrate tombstones, a willow tree serves as a mourning sentinel here and there, while the odours of flowers, emblems of undying hopes, are wafted to us on the balmy air as we stand, with memories of the past rushing on the mind, and gaze silently on the scene. The building looks very quaint in the midst of the modern life which surrounds it.
It was a smile that came often, and when really unfurled to its greatest width it gave the pleasing effect of a dark face ambushed behind a row of white tombstones.
On the tombstones of Christians of the fourth century are pictures representing, not Jesus, but a lamb, working the miracles mentioned in the gospels, such as multiplying the loaves and fishes, and raising Lazarus from the dead. The first representations of a human form on the cross differ considerably from those which prevail at the present time.
Some member of the family happening years afterwards to stroll through a very old cemetery in Dublin, curiosity or idleness led him to examine the tombstones. One in particular attracted his attention, perhaps because it was more dilapidated and tumble-down than the rest.
As they stood upon that bleak hillside, dotted over with white tombstones, the looming city in the distance off at the right, Courtland recognized the group of spreading buildings that belonged to-his university. He marveled at the closeness of life and death in this world.
The inscriptions may therefore be read with certainty, but hitherto very few have been found which throw the least light on history. They are mostly epitaphs on tombstones.
On these same mornings, but a few hours later, another writer looked down on the same faded tombstones, for Ray Palmer was the teacher of a young ladies' school down Fulton Street beyond Broadway. He was young then, in his twenty-second year, in ill-health, and suffering under discouragements that would have been unendurable to a weaker-dispositioned man.
"The wall of the church faces the manse, but the church yard is on a level with the top of the wall ... and the tombstones are visible from the enclosure of the manse.... Under the retaining wall was a somewhat dark pathway, extending from the stable to the far end of the garden, and called the 'witches' walk' from a game we used to play in it.... Even out of the 'witches' walk' you saw the Manse facing toward you, with its back to the river and the wooded bank, and the bright flower-plots and stretches of comfortable vegetables in front and on each side of it; flower plots and vegetable borders, by the way, on which it was almost death to set foot, and about which we held a curious belief, namely, that my grandfather went round and measured any footprints that he saw, to compare the measurement at night with the boots put out for brushing; to avoid which we were accustomed, by a strategic movement of the foot to make the mark longer....
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