It was an article of belief, in my Utopian childhood, that a soldier could do no wrong. It went hard with me, in my eleventh year, to catch a glimpse of the silver Maltese cross, the badge of the impeccable Fifth Corps, on the breast of a scowling state prisoner, the hero "shorn of his beams." His arm no longer rested on a howitzer; he wielded a crowbar. He might have hallowed Libby or Andersonville with his passing, and now,--O Absalom!
The warden, the benignant warden, himself of the "trade of war," did he know what he was doing, when he assured me that the cells were peopled with ex-Federal knights? Men have tried vainly to restore the lost completeness of the glorious statue of Melos. Even so with a broken faith. What it might have been is out of the province of diviners.
A KINDNESS for graveyards, and a superadded leaning to the old, battered, weed-grown ones, are not incompatible with the cheeriest spirit. A marked distinction is to be drawn between the amateur and the professional haunter of the _coemetrion_, the place of sleep. If the pilgrimage among marbles cannot be an impersonal matter, pray, sweet reader, keep to the courts of the living. The intolerable pain of meeting with some clear-cut beloved name; the chance of stumbling on some parody of the departed, under a glass case, or of brushing against the clayey sexton, fresh from his delving,--these are things whose risk one would not willingly run. Therefore stick to antiquities, and let thy fastidious eye look with favor at no carven mortuary date that was cut later than under the third of the Georges. If there be a suspicion of Scotch granite, or of landscape gardening in any God's acre as thou passest by, turn thee about to windward. But where there stand, in honest slate, armorial ensigns, gaping cherubs, and cheerful scythes and hour-glasses, labelled (as a child labels his drawing, "This is a cow") with "Memento mori," or the scarcely less admirable truism, "Fugit hora," then enter in, and read that chronicle, with its grassy margin, which the centuries have written.
Here is the great dormitory; here sits the little god Harpocrates, swinging on the lotos-leaf, his finger on his lips.
"No noyse here But the toning of a teare."