Within the cemetery "distance lent enchantment to the view." As seen from the cloister which surrounds the great square, as has been mentioned, the outlook over the "poor quarter" of the vast burial-ground was very striking. Amid the wilderness of black crosses, which extends farther than eye could see, numerous figures were flitting hither and thither, many of them with lights in their hands. In the farther distance, where the figures were invisible, the lights could still be seen mysteriously, as it seemed, moving over the closely-ranged graves like corpse-candles, as the old superstition termed the phosphoric lights which may in certain states of the atmosphere be seen in crowded graveyards. In the foreground, where the figures could be distinguished, many were seen on their knees in the damp and malarious evening air at the graves of their lost relatives. But not even in the bearing these could anything of real earnestness be traced. They were performing a routine duty, of which no doubt their own consciences and their friends and neighbors would have disapproved the omission; and that was all. Nevertheless, the _picturesqueness_ of the general effect was perfect, and it appealed to the imagination of a looker-on in a manner which to many minds, more intent on sensational emotions than on discrimination of social characteristics, would have caused the above remarks to appear sadly ill-timed and out of place.
The scene which was meantime being enacted on the Pincetto, where the wholly separated resting-places of the "Upper Ten" protest so successfully against the leveling notion that in death all are equal, I might have suggested many a mordant epigram to the cynically-minded visitor. I fear that there is often something provocative of cynicism in sundry of the aspects of fashionable devotion, but on such an occasion as the present it could hardly be otherwise. Rachels in Parisian bonnets and sweeping silk skirts, muttering over their rosaries for their children on splendid cushions borne in due state by attendant plush-clothed ministers, were contrasted in these realms of the universal Leveler somewhat too strongly with the scene one had just left in the (physically and socially) lower regions of the cemetery. Of course hearts that beat beneath silken bodices may be wrung as bitterly as those that serge covers. I am speaking only of those outward manifestations which contributed to complete the strangeness of the general spectacle which I had come out to see. The better tending of the aristocratic portion of the cemetery, and the greater space between the graves and their monuments, made it of course easier and less disagreeable to pass among them and to note the bearing of individual mourners. If the former scene had presented much that was indecorously formal, here all was decorously formal. The routine, cut-and-dry nature of the duty being performed exercised in either case its property of numbing natural feeling, or at least the appearance of it.