Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
A large part of the northeastern bank of the Schuylkill adjoining the
Park is the Laurel Hill Cemetery. Its winding walks and terraced
slopes and ravines give constantly varying landscapes, making it one
of the most beautiful burial-places in existence. In front, the river
far beneath curves around like a bow. Some of its mausoleums are of
enormous cost and elaborate ornamentation, but generally the grandeur
of the location eclipses the work of the decorator. Standing on a
jutting eminence is the Disston Mausoleum, which entombs an English
sawmaker who came to Philadelphia without friends and almost
penniless, and died at the head of the greatest sawmaking
establishment on the Continent. At one place, as the river bends, the
broad and rising terraces of tombs curve around like the banks of
seats in a grand Roman amphitheatre. Here is the grave of General
Meade who commanded at Gettysburg. In a plain, unmarked sepulchre
fronting the river, hewn out of the solid rock, is entombed the Arctic
explorer who conducted the Grinnell expedition in search of Sir John
Franklin, Dr. Elisha Kent Kane. A single shaft on a little eminence
nearby marks the grave of Charles Thomson, the Secretary of the
Continental Congress that made the Declaration of Independence. Some
of the graves are in exquisite situations, many having been chosen by
those who lie there. Here are buried Thomas Godfrey, the inventor of
the mariner's quadrant; General Hugh Mercer, who fell at the head of
the Pennsylvania troops in the Revolutionary battle of Princeton, the
Scots' Society of St. Andrew having erected a monument to his memory;
Commodore Isaac Hull, who commanded the American frigate
"Constitution" in the War of 1812 when she captured the British
frigate "Guerrière;" Harry Wright, the "father of base-ball," who died
in 1895; and Thomas Buchanan Read, the poet-artist. At the cemetery
entrance is the famous "Old Mortality" group, carved in Scotland and
sent to Philadelphia. The quaint old Scotsman reclines on a
gravestone, and pauses in his task of chipping-out the half-effaced
letters of the inscription, while the little pony patiently waits
alongside of him for his master and Sir Walter Scott to finish their
discourse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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