Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/356

Rh sad impressions could not long remain in my mind this morning. I advanced onward along the high road which now ascended a hill. On the top of this hill I could look around me I thought. Arrived here, I saw an iron gate on my right hand, which led into a beautiful, well-kept park. I opened the gate without any difficulty, and was soon in a very beautiful park, the ground of which was undulating, through which wound roads and foot-paths, with lofty trees and groves on all hands, and beds of flowering, fragrant shrubs and plants. It was some time before I could see a single monument, before I discovered that I really was in the place consecrated to death, and that my little travelling-fairy had faithfully conducted me to my goal, Rose Cemetery.

Wandering on through the silent solitary park I came to the banks of a river which ran in gentle windings between banks as beautiful, and as youthfully verdant as we, in our youth, imagine the Elysian fields. On my side of the river I beheld white marble monuments glancing forth from amid the trees, speaking of the city of the dead. Tall trees here and there, bent over the water. Large, splendid butterflies, the names of which I did not know, flew softly with fluttering wings backwards and forwards over the stream, from one bank to the other. I thought of the words:—

And the whole scene was to me, at the same time, a living symbol of the most beautiful presentiments of the human race regarding the mystery of death. Here was the city of the dead, and here, beside it, living water pouring from invisible fountains, whispering in the fields of death, of life and the resurrection; here were trees, that glorious life of nature, bearing abundant fruit, and the leaves of which serve for the “healing of the heathen;” there, on the other shore, were the fields of the blessed,