The associated feeling, the _expression_, is undoubtedly the chief thing in the general effect, but the constituents or objects which compose the scene are in themselves pleasing; and one scarcely less important than the building itself, the universal grass, the dark, red-barked tree, is the gravestone. I mean the gravestone that is attractive in shape, which may be seen in every old village churchyard in Hampshire; for not all the stones are of this character. The stone that is beautiful dates back half a century at least, but very few are as old as a century and a half. When we get that far and farther back the inscription is obliterated or indecipherable. Only here and there we may by chance find some stone, half buried in the soil, of an exceptional hardness, marking the spot where lieth one who departed this life in the seventeenth or early in the eighteenth century. There are many old stones, it is true, with nothing legible on them, but one does not know how old they are. It is not that these gravestones are beautiful only because they are old, and have had their hard surface softened and embroidered with green moss and lichen of many shades from pale-grey to orange and red and brown. The form of the stone, the stone-cutter's work, was beautiful before Nature began to work on it with her sunshine, her rain, her invisible seed. I cannot think why this old fashion, or rather, let us say, this tender, sacred custom, of marking the last resting-place of the dead with a memorial satisfying to the æsthetic sense, should have gone or died out. The gravestones {193} used at the present time are, as a rule, twice as big as the old ones, and are perfectly plain--immense stone slabs, inscribed with big, fat, black letters differing in size, the whole inscription curiously resembling the local auctioneer's bills to be seen pasted up on barn-doors, fences, and other suitable places. So big and hard, and bold, and ugly--I try not to see them!