The Christian Comforter

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MARIA. Thy day without a cloud hath past, And thou wert lovely to the last. I Was spending an hour amid the tombs of sacred Auburn, indulging the thoughts that were excited, and, as I looked on a familiar name carved in the marble or stone, experiencing what Ossian has called the joy of grief. Sweet to the...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MARIA. Thy day without a cloud hath past, And thou wert lovely to the last. I Was spending an hour amid the tombs of sacred Auburn, indulging the thoughts that were excited, and, as I looked on a familiar name carved in the marble or stone, experiencing what Ossian has called the joy of grief. Sweet to the soul is such a place Holy and soothing the influence of wandering in the shady paths, and yielding our sympathies to the calls of disappointed and afflicted affection. How different the inscriptions and how various the emotions excited in the reader Here is one leading the mind to pay reverence to departed worth and think of heaven as the home of vanished excellence, and here is another that tells only of the grief of the living Here rises an humble tablet, and there a huge and massive mausoleum, the one telling as eloquently as the other that the dead are remembered. It does not need a stately column, or lofty pile, to awaken deep thought and emotion while we pause at a grave. Simplicity can do as much as magnificence; for certain I am that I felt not so deeply at the splendid memento, as I did when I looked on a spot where art had done but little. Our admiration of human art takes from the mind its sympathy with the deadand the sanctities of the grave. I paused at the sight of a little piece of marble lying on a green spot, and found that it marked the grave of a child. A sweet spot it was indeed The size of the grave was marked by a slight elevation of the earth, on which the grass was thick and bright, and at the head lay a small piece of marble on which was sculptured the single name? Maria Around the grave a narrow strip of earth was filled with lowly flowers, and fresh were they in the beauty of their bloom. How simple, and yet how touching How quickly ...