Vineyard, insure their dead friends a longer and dearer remembrance than the daily novelty and revolving bustle of the world can elsewhere afford to beings of the past.  Yet, while every family is anxious to erect a memorial to its departed members, the untainted breath of Ocean bestows such health and length of days upon the people of the isles as would cause a melancholy dearth of business to a resident artist in that line.  His own monument, recording his decease by starvation, would probably be an early specimen of his skill.  Gravestones, therefore, have generally been an article of imported merchandise.

In my walks through the burial-ground of Edgartown—­where the dead have lain so long that the soil, once enriched by their decay, has returned to its original barrenness—­in that ancient burial-ground I noticed much variety of monumental sculpture.  The elder stones, dated a century back or more, have borders elaborately carved with flowers and are adorned with a multiplicity of death’s-heads, crossbones, scythes, hour-glasses, and other lugubrious emblems of mortality, with here and there a winged cherub to direct the mourner’s spirit upward.  These productions of Gothic taste must have been quite beyond the colonial skill of the day, and were probably carved in London and brought across the ocean to commemorate the defunct worthies of this lonely isle.  The more recent monuments are mere slabs of slate in the ordinary style, without any superfluous flourishes to set off the bald inscriptions.  But others—­and those far the most impressive both to my taste and feelings—­were roughly hewn from the gray rocks of the island, evidently by the unskilled hands of surviving friends and relatives.  On some there were merely the initials of a name; some were inscribed with misspelt prose or rhyme, in deep letters which the moss and wintry rain of many years had not been able to obliterate.  These, these were graves where loved ones slept.  It is an old theme of satire, the falsehood and vanity of monumental eulogies; but when affection and sorrow grave the letters with their own painful labor, then we may be sure that they copy from the record on their hearts.

My acquaintance the sculptor—­he may share that title with Greenough, since the dauber of signs is a painter as well as Raphael—­had found a ready market for all his blank slabs of marble and full occupation in lettering and ornamenting them.  He was an elderly man, a descendant of the old Puritan family of Wigglesworth, with a certain simplicity and singleness both of heart and mind which, methinks, is more rarely found among us Yankees than in any other community of people.  In spite of his gray head and wrinkled brow, he was quite like a child in all matters save what had some reference to his own business; he seemed, unless my fancy misled me, to view mankind in no other relation than as people in want of tombstones, and his literary attainments evidently comprehended very little either of prose of poetry