The Recreations of a Country ParsonBoyd, Andrew Kennedy Hutchison
General
The Recreations of a Country Parson
Boyd, Andrew Kennedy Hutchison
Clergy -- Anecdotes; Country life -- England; Rural clergy -- England
over the graves where successive generations of simple rustics have
found their last resting-place, and where in the twilight the owls
hoot from the tower of the ivy-covered church. There is the bare
enclosure, surrounded by four walls, and without a tree, far up the
lonely Highland hill-side; and more lonely still, the little gray
stone, rising above the purple heather, where rude letters, touched
up by Old Mortality's hands, tell that one, probably two or three,
rest beneath, who were done to death for what they firmly believed
was their Redeemer's cause, by Claverhouse or Dalyell. There is
the churchyard by the bleak sea-shore, where coffins have been laid
bare by the encroaching waves; and the niche in cathedral crypt,
or the vault under the church's floor. I cannot conceive anything
more irreverent than the American fashion of burying in unconsecrated
earth, each family having its own place of interment in the corner
of its own garden: unless it be the crotchet of the silly old
peer, who spent the last years of his life in erecting near his
castle-door, a preposterous building, the progress of which he
watched day by day with the interest of a man who had worn out all
other interest, occasionally lying down in the stone coffin which
he had caused to be prepared, to make sure that it would fit him.
I feel sorry, too, for the poor old Pope, who when he dies is laid
on a shelf above a door in St. Peter's, where he remains till the
next Pope dies, and then is put out of the way to make room for
him; nor do I at all envy the noble who has his family vault filled
with coffins covered with velvet and gold, occupied exclusively by
corpses of good quality. It is better surely to be laid, as Allan
Cunningham wished, where we shall 'not be built over;' where 'the
wind shall blow and the daisy grow upon our grave.' Let it be
among our kindred, indeed, in accordance with the natural desire;
but not on dignified shelves, not in aristocratic vaults, but lowly
and humbly, where the Christian dead sleep for the Resurrection.
Most people will sympathize so far with Beattie, though his lines
show that he was a Scotchman, and lived where there are not many
trees:--
Mine be the breezy hill that skirts the down,
Where a green grassy turf is all I crave,
With here and there a violet bestrown,
Fast by a brook, or fountain's murmuring wave;
And many an evening sun shine sweetly on my grave!
But it depends entirely upon individual associations and fancies
where one would wish to rest after life's fitful fever: and I have
hardly ever been more deeply impressed than by certain lines which
I cut out of an old newspaper when I was a boy, and which set out
a choice far different from that of The Minstrel. They are written
by Mr. Westwood, a true poet, though not known as he deserves to
be. Here they are:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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