When in my travels I pass through a town, or village, which I have not seen, if I have sufficient leisure, the first place which I visit, is uniformly the church-yard. The feeling that I am a stranger, that I know not the scenery, and that it knows not me, naturally induces a sort of pensive meditation, which disposes me for that sojourn. I form certain estimates of the taste and moral feeling of the people, from the forms and devices of the slabs and monuments; and the order in which the consecrated ground is inclosed, and kept. The inscriptions are ordinarily, in too bad a taste to claim much interest, though there are few church-yards, that cannot show some monuments, which, by their eccentric variation from the rest, mark character. All this is a matter of trifling interest, compared with the throng of remembrances and anticipations, that naturally crowd upon the spirit of a stranger in such a place. Youth with its rainbows, and its loves; mature age with its ambitious projects; old age in the midst of children, death in the natal spot, or the house of the stranger; eternity with its dim and illimitable mysteriousness; these shadowy images, with their associated thoughts, pass through the mind, and return, like the guests at an inn. While I look up towards the rolling clouds, and the sun walking his unvarying path along the firmament, how natural the reflection, that they will present the same aspect, and suggest the same reflections, that the trees will stand forth in their foliage and the hills in their verdure, to him who comes after me, when I shall have taken my place with the unconscious sleepers about me! I never fail to recollect the charming reflections in a number of the Spectator, that treats upon a visit to Westminster Abbey, the most impressive writing of the kind, as it seems to me, in our language. Here is the place to reflect upon the folly, if not the guilt, of human hatred and revenge, ambition and avarice, and the million puerile projects and cares, that are incessantly over-clouding the sunshine of existence. What an eloquent lesson do these voiceless preachers read, upon the wisdom of most of those thoughts and solicitudes, that disturb our course through life! The heart cannot but be made better by occasional communion with these tenants of the narrow house, where-- ‘Each waits the other’s license to disturb The deep, unbroken silence.’ Note 53a, page 152.