I have tried my walks in suburbs and city streets, in parks and open country, but I prefer cemeteries. Their advantages are several. They provide peace where even parks do not. And they have the emoluments both of nature and architecture. It is a rare cemetery devoid of the grass, trees and birds that grace the parks; and there are few without monuments of as much variety of form as the houses of the most interesting neighborhoods.
The two largest cemeteries I have visited are Cave Hill in Louisville and Hollywood in Richmond. Cave Hill was chartered in 1848 on a farm belonging originally to a William Johnston (d. 1797). It was designed as a garden cemetery, popular during that era for walks, trysts, picnics and pleasant society in general. At times during its early existence, its grounds also contained a pesthouse and an insane asylum.
The name of the cemetery is derived from a small cave in the hill on which the cemetery rests. The mouth of this cave is closely adjoined by Beargrass Creek which divides the cemetery and is supplemented by five man-made ponds. Several well-known people are buried there: Henry Watterson, George Rogers Clark and Col. Harland Sanders among them. The grounds are extensive, covering nearly 300 acres. The whole is encircled by a high brick wall topped with barbed tape, or razor wire, and thickly overgrown by vines.
Cave Hill contains every sort of monument—obelisks, eggs, angels on pedestals, stones of all shapes and engraving, a variety of quaint mausoleums, and a structure where the urns of ashes are stored. The other day, I stood at the threshold of a mausoleum, the twin black iron doors of which were each penetrated by holes in the form of a cross. To these doors led a short walk as to the front door of any residence, and at the end of it were pillars covered with moss so dark as to be nearly black.
In another area, I found the nondescript stones of Civil War graves—those of the Union soldiers consistently white, those of the Confederates, gray. Not far from these was erected a placard bearing lines by Theodore O’Hara, born in Danville and a soldier, from his poem “Bivouac of the Dead”:
On Fame's eternal camping-ground
Their silent tents are spread,
And Glory guards, with solemn round,
The bivouac of the dead.
The effect of walking in a cemetery must vary widely with personality, circumstance and the cemetery itself. But there can be few experiences more likely to put a person in mind of the otherworldly than to follow the paths of Cave Hill on a quiet, fair day when the birds and wind are the only sounds. The sheer extent of the place, the interruption of all horizons by hill, monument and encircling wall, the pleasantry of birds and foliage, the solemnity of the countless names and dates of death, with all their suggestion of headlong and crowded passage from the world, have the power to strike the passer-through with vague anticipation that this picturesque village of small but noble architecture must hide its residents in some distant pavilion where the prevailing silence is broken by their cheerful sound. Yet in as little as the lapse of a few minutes thought, the same scenes inspire an equally profound loneliness, to think that all of these have passed out of space and time, where neither we nor our gardens can take place in their thoughts.
No more impressive remembrance has passed my eyes than the high granite pyramid of primordial appearance that looms on the ground of Hollywood in Richmond to the memory of Confederate soldiers. Ninety foot tall, it bears, on two brass plates, the inscription Memoria in Aeterna / Numini et Patriae Asto—In eternal memory of those who stood for God and country.
Hollywood Cemetery was opened one year after Cave Hill, and shares its quality of extensive rolling parkland. But it is distinguished by a wilder, more uneven ground. The undulations of the earth rise and fall more precipitantly than those of its Kentucky cousin, and one side of the cemetery is bordered by the James River, which mirrors the character of the grounds in its rocky and turbulent current.
Here may be found the graves of three presidents—John Tyler, James Monroe and Jefferson Davis. Monroe’s grave is enclosed by an intricate cage of wrought iron. And beside Davis’s stands the stone figure of a woman, cloak and hooded, and in an attitude to inspire thoughts of ancient and apocalyptic worlds, so solemn, humble and hidden is the face.
Upon some of the graves, I found a peculiar mark; an S, crossed vertically by three lines. It was not until I returned home that I learned it was a monogram of the letters IHS, which form the beginning of the Greek spelling of the name of the Christ: IHSUS.
On others, of those who died not in childhood or in full maturity, I find commonly the expression At Peace, which is the consolation most to be borne in mind where a life is cut off in its quickening. These deaths are, if not more grieved, more indelibly remembered, since they have endeared by personality and been parted without the emolument of time. That this is so is long testified by the pictured mourning of tragedies as well as by elegy:
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.
Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew
Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.
He must not float upon his watery bier
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,
Without the meed of some melodious tear.
Over many a grave may be found names now extinct in usage, some of them as common in their time as Ashley in ours. And they show nothing more vividly than the immanent quaintness of all names with the immanent departure of their bearers from the world.
Other cemeteries than those mentioned present a far humbler aspect. A small churchyard I visited contained some graves marked by no stone at all but only rudimentary wooden crosses and the oblong depressions of ground that indicate the absence of both vault and caretaker.
But over them, as over those of all cemeteries, remains the same atmosphere of quiet and peaceful solitude that opens the mind to life perhaps no less than to death—
A gulf that ever shuts and gapes,
A hand that points, and palled shapes
In shadowy thoroughfares of thought.
