In pent-up cities the graves cluster round ancient churches: congregations after congregations are pressed into festering earth until the inclosure becomes a charnel-house; yet they prove how devoutly later occupants have longed to rest in death with the loved in life. The nameless mounds are hardly shrouded by broken turf; records, on the cankering, crumbling head-stones, are almost obliterated; some are closely bordered and capped by heavy stones, as if rich inheritors dreaded a resurrection; others there are, where the dock and the nettle are matted around rusty railings, as though no hand remained that ever pressed, in friendship or affection, the hand which moulders beneath; others, again, are marked by broad head-stones, new and well-lettered, the black on the pure white setting forth a proud array of virtues, of which the co-mates of the departed never heard; a few dingy and heavy monuments stand apart, and look down with civic haughtiness on humbler graves. Repulsive specimens of bad taste are these elaborate monuments often; in their ornaments so unmeaning, their clumsy dignity so intrusive, so coarsely ostentatious--the epitaphs so earnest in saying _by whom_ the carved stones were erected! Our village churchyards, lying away amid glorious trees, or tranquil valleys, or sleeping on the sloping hills, where "birds sing, lambs bleat, and ploughboys whistle,"--however picturesque they may appear in the distance, have frequently the same uncared for aspect as those within the city. We love the living, but we _seem_ to care little for the dead. However much we may muse on crossing "the churchyard," or indulge in poesy, where "The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep," our places of burial, with the exception of cemeteries, which are as yet too new to show what they may become, bear but slight testimony to the "love which lives forever." The contrast is humiliating when we visit other lands, and mark the attention paid to graves of relatives and friends. A certain sum is annually set apart by the peasants in many districts of France, for visiting and decking the resting-places of those whom Death has taken; the fresh garland is hung on the simple cross, and the prayer earnestly repeated for the soul's peace; and these tributes continue for years and years, long after the bitterness of sorrow has passed away. We have seen an aged woman, with white hair, strewing flowers on her mother's grave, though forty years had passed since the separation of the living from the dead; and once, attracted by the beauty of a girl who had been decking, and then praying, beside a nameless grave, we asked for whom she mourned--although the word "mourned" had little association with her bright face and sunny smile.