Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 1 | Page 8

shrine of Edward the Confessor, and I ascended the small staircase

that conducts to it, to take from thence a general survey of this
wilderness of tombs. The shrine is elevated upon a kind of platform,
and close around it are the sepulchers of various kings and queens.
From this eminence the eye looks down between pillars and funeral
trophies to the chapels and chambers below, crowded with tombs;
where warriors, prelates, courtiers and statesmen lie moldering in their
"beds of darkness." Close by me stood the great chair of coronation,
rudely carved of oak, in the barbarous taste of a remote and Gothic age.
The scene seemed almost as if contrived, with theatrical artifice, to
produce an effect upon the beholder. Here was a type of the beginning
and the end of human pomp and power; here it was literally but a step
from the throne to the sepulcher. Would not one think that these
incongruous mementos had been gathered together as a lesson to living
greatness, to show it, even in the moment of its proudest exaltation, the
neglect and dishonor to which it must soon arrive; how soon that crown
which encircles its brow must pass away, and it must lie down in the
dust and disgraces of the tomb, and be trampled upon by the feet of the
meanest of the multitude?...
The last beams of day were now faintly streaming through the painted
windows in the high vaults above me; the lower parts of the abbey were
already wrapt in the obscurity of twilight. The chapels and aisles grew
darker and darker. The effigies of the kings faded into shadows; the
marble figures of the monuments assumed strange shapes in the
uncertain light; the evening breeze crept through the aisles like the cold
breath of the grave; and even the distant footfall of a verger, traversing
the Poet's Corner, had something strange and dreary in its sound. I
slowly retraced my morning's walk, and as I passed out at the portal of
the cloisters the door, closing with a jarring noise behind me, filled the
whole building with echoes.
I endeavored to form some arrangement in my mind of the objects I had
been contemplating, but found they were already fallen into
indistinctness and confusion. Names, inscriptions, trophies, had all
become confounded in my recollection, tho I had scarcely taken my
foot from off the threshold. What, thought I, is this vast assemblage of
sepulchers but a treasury of humiliation; a huge pile of reiterated
homilies on the emptiness of renown and the certainty of oblivion! It is,
indeed, the empire of death; his great shadowy palace, where he sits in

state, mocking at the relics of human glory, and spreading dust and
forgetfulness on the monuments of princes. How idle a boast, after all,
is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his
pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present, to think
of the characters and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each
age is a volume thrown aside to be speedily forgotten. The idol of
to-day pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection; and will, in
turn, be supplanted by his successor of to-morrow.
"Our fathers," says Sir Thomas Browne, "find their graves in our short
memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors."
History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and
controversy; the inscription molders from the tablet; the statue falls
from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps
of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust? What is
the security of a tomb, or the perpetuity of an embalmment? The
remains of Alexander the Great have been scattered to the wind, and his
empty sarcophagus is now the mere curiosity of a museum. "The
Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now
consumeth; Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams."
[Footnote: Sir Thomas Browne.]
What, then, is to insure this pile which now towers above me from
sharing the fate of mightier mausoleums? The time must come when its
gilded vaults, which now spring so loftily, shall lie in rubbish beneath
the feet; when, instead of the sound of melody and praise, the wind
shall whistle through the broken arches, and the owl hoot from the
shattered tower--when the garish sunbeam shall break into these
gloomy mansions of death, and the ivy twine round the fallen column;
and the foxglove hang its blossoms about the nameless urn, as if in
mockery of the dead. Thus the man passes away; his name perishes
from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his
very monument becomes a ruin.