Page:The Excursion, Wordsworth, 1814.djvu/463

437 the Dead within, or contiguous to, their places of worship; however splendid or imposing may be the appearances of those Edifices, or however interesting or salutary the recollections associated with them. Even were it not true that Tombs lose their monitory virtue when thus obtruded upon the notice of Men occupied with the cares of the World, and too often sullied and defiled by those cares, yet still, when Death is in our thoughts, nothing can make amends for the want of the soothing influences of Nature, and for the absence of those types of renovation and decay, which the fields and woods offer to the notice of the serious and contemplative mind. To feel the force of this sentiment, let a man only compare in imagination the unsightly manner in which our Monuments are crowded together in the busy, noisy, unclean, and almost grassless Church-yard of a large Town, with the still seclusion of a Turkish Cemetery, in some remote place; and yet further sanctified by the Grove of Cypress in which it is embosomed. Thoughts in the same temper as these have already been expressed with true sensibility by an ingenuous Poet of the present day. The subject of his Poem is "All Saints Church, Derby:" he has been deploring the forbidding and unseemly appearance of its burial-ground, and uttering a wish, that in past times the practice had been adopted of interring the Inhabitants of large Towns in the Country.—

"Then in some rural, calm, sequestered spot,

Where healing Nature her benignant look

Ne'er changes, save at that lorn season, when,

With tresses drooping o'er her sable stole,

She yearly mourns the mortal doom of man,

Her noblest work, (so Israel's virgins erst,

With annual moan upon the mountains wept

Their fairest gone) there in that rural scene,

So placid, so congenial to the wish

The Christian feels, of peaceful rest within