Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 2: Great Britain and Ireland, Part 2
General
Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 2: Great Britain and Ireland, Part 2
Great Britain -- Description and travel; Ireland -- Description and travel
The church itself is an interesting but not remarkable edifice, old,
small, and solidly built in a style common enough in England. Nothing,
however, could be more in keeping with the associations of the scene.
The very humility of the edifice has a property of its own, for anything
more magnificent would jar upon the feelings, as the monument in the
Park does most decidedly. It was Gray's wish that he might be buried
here, near the mother whom he loved so well; otherwise he could hardly
have escaped the posthumous misfortune of a tomb in Westminster Abbey or
St. Paul's. In such case the world would have missed one of the most
charming of associations, and the great poem the most poetical of its
features. For surely it was fit that he who sang so touchingly of the
dead here sleeping, should find near them his last resting-place; that
when the pleasant toil in libraries was over, the last folio closed by
those industrious hands, the last manuscript collated, and the last
flower picked for the herbarium, he who here so tenderly sang of the
emptiness of earthly honors and the nothingness of worldly success should
be buried humbly near those whom he best loved, and where all the moral
of his teaching might be perpetually illustrated. I wondered, as I stood
there, whether Horace Walpole ever thought it worth his while, for the
sake of that early friendship which was so rudely broken, to come there,
away from the haunts of fashion, or from his plaything villa at
Strawberry Hill, to muse for a moment over the grave of one who rated
pedigrees and peerages at their just value. Probably my Lord Orford was
never guilty of such a piece of sentimentality. He was thinking too much
of his pictures and coins and eternal bric-a-brac for that.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account