Latter Day Saints; United States -- Description and travel
The account I have given you of my visit to this sanctuary, is so full of
death I need scarcely take you to the village burial ground. It was a
place, however, consecrated by the dust of too many dear friends for me to
abstain from treading among its grass-covered and heaped hillocks of earth.
This burial place, consisting of several acres of ground, enclosed by a
neat pale, and shaded by shrubbery and trees, was located in the outskirts
of the town, and at present, is seldom used for interments. A solitary walk
amid its graves brought up a long train of recollections of the past. How
mournful, yet how sacred did I find the satisfaction of brushing away the
long grass that had grown over the spot where reposed the mouldered ashes
of one who gamboled with me amid the sports of childhood's careless hour,
and rushed onward at my side in life's joyous course till youth was
ripening into manhood, and then the barbed arrow of death met him, and he
fell like a young, vigorous, foliage-clad tree, struck by heaven's bolt, in
all the freshness of his existence! How mysterious and inscrutable did the
ways of Providence appear to me as I trod down the tall weeds that had
grown up around the grave of one who had been associated with me during a
portion of my academical life, and who looked forward to the same
profession with myself! C---- had one of the warmest and most amiable
hearts that ever beat within the human bosom. He had faults of character,
but they were all counterbalanced and lost amid the many excellencies that
distinguished him. He had long contended with poverty and discouragements
of various kinds, in order to press his way towards the sacred ministry.
After years of toil, and sacrifices of every kind, when he had just reached
the goal, and was to be invested with the ministry of reconciliation,
disease fastened upon his earthly tabernacle, and he sank down in death. No
tender mother, nor kind sister was near to close his dying eyes. No family
friends were present to follow his remains to the tomb. There he lies in a
lone spot, far from the home of his childhood, with the weeds grown up all
around his grave, and few that pass by understand the full import of the
simple inscription of the marble slab that marks the spot where his ashes
repose!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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