The clean-swept paths, the flowery garden-graves, the close-mown turf, the shrubs and bowering trees, and the varied, often elegant tombs amongst them, give Hampstead churchyard an air of beautiful repose and quiet.[70] Two magnificent yew-trees with straight, tall, channelled trunks, centuries old, spread their wide horizontal branches over spaces ‘sacred to many sorrows.’ Beneath the first of them, to the east, is the grave of Sir James Macintosh, ‘a man,’ says Mr. Howitt, ‘of grave, practical, useful, and moderately reforming character and talents, rather than of that broad and original stamp which marks the foremost leaders of mankind.’ If we take the first path to the left hand on entering the graveyard, we pass on the side nearest the wall the tombstone of Henry Cort, ironmaster, who greatly improved the manufacture of British iron, and according to Mr. William Fairbairn, in his ‘History of Iron and its Manufacture,’ conferred on his country during the last three or four generations equivalent to six hundred millions sterling, and has given employment to six hundred thousand of the working population, but who himself was suffered to die of disappointment and broken fortune in the sixtieth year of his age. Passing on to the second cross on the right of this path, we find the headstone which marks the simple grave of Lucy Aikin, who lies at the feet of her friend and neighbour, Joanna Baillie, whose railed-in altar-tomb has still a little footpath worn by pilgrims’ feet on the grass beside it. ‘Oh, who shall lightly say that fame Is nothing but an empty name? When but for those, our _gifted_ dead, All ages past a blank would be, Sunk in oblivion’s murky bed.’ It is only fitting that she, who sang thus in her ‘Metrical Legends of Exalted Character,’ should in her village grave illustrate the sentiment of these lines. If we follow the east path to the end, and keep in the one under the south-east wall, the second tomb is that of John Constable, R.A. He rests beside his beloved partner, Maria Elizabeth Bicknell, and one or more of their children. He died in London, March 31, 1837. A little further on, under the same sheltering wall, lies a flat stone inscribed, ‘Sacred to the Memory of Maria Honey, whose mortal remains repose in the vault beneath. She died in the year of our Lord 1843, in the 27th year of her age.’ Some of our readers remember the brilliant, graceful actress, and thus can feel the pathetic force of the brief lines inscribed beneath: ‘Shall I remain forgotten in the dust, When Fate, relenting, lets the flowers revive?’[71] [Illustration: _Parish Church, Hampstead._]