Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland : $b or, The traditional history of Cromarty — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland : $b or, The traditional history of Cromarty
John Stuart Mill · en
Perhaps no personage of real life can be more properly regarded as a
hermit of the churchyard than the itinerant sculptor, who wanders from
one country burying-ground to another, recording on his tablets of
stone the tears of the living and the worth of the dead. If possessed
of an ordinary portion of feeling and imagination, he can scarce fail
of regarding his profession as a school of benevolence and poetry. For
my own part, I have seldom thrown aside the hammer and trowel of the
stone-mason for the chisel of the itinerant sculptor, without receiving
some fresh confirmation of the opinion. How often have I suffered
my mallet to rest on the unfinished epitaph, when listening to some
friend of the buried expatiating, with all the eloquence of grief, on
the mysterious warning--and the sad deathbed--on the worth that had
departed--and the sorrow that remained behind! How often, forgetting
that I was merely an auditor, have I so identified myself with the
mourner as to feel my heart swell, and my eyes becoming moist! Even
the very aspect of a solitary churchyard seems conducive to habits of
thought and feeling. I have risen from my employment to mark the shadow
of tombstone and burial-mound creeping over the sward at my feet, and
have been rendered serious by the reflection, that as those gnomons
of the dead marked out no line of hours, though the hours passed as
the shadows moved, so, in that eternity in which even the dead exist,
there is a nameless tide of continuity, but no division of time. I
have become sad, when, looking on the green mounds around me, I have
regarded them as waves of triumph which time and death have rolled over
the wreck of man; and the feeling has deepened, when, looking down with
the eye of imagination through this motionless sea of graves, I have
marked the sad remains of both the long-departed and the recent dead
thickly strewed over the bottom. I have grieved above the half-soiled
shroud of her for whom the tears of bereavement had not yet been dried
up, and sighed over the mouldering bones of him whose very name had
long since perished from the earth.
[Sidenote: KIRK-MICHAEL.]