* * * * *

    At the Last Day I’m sure I shall appear,
    To meet with Jesus Christ my Saviour dear: 
    Where I do hope to live with Him in bliss. 
    Oh, what a joy at my last hour was this!

* * * * *

    Aged 3 Months.

    What Christ said once He said to all,
    Come unto Me, ye children small: 
    None shall do you any wrong,
    For to My Kingdom you belong.

* * * * *

    Aged 10 Weeks.

    The Babe was sucking at the breast
    When God did call him to his rest.

In an obscure corner of a country church-yard I once espied, half overgrown with hemlock and nettles, a very small stone laid upon the ground, bearing nothing more than the name of the deceased with the date of birth and death, importing that it was an infant which had been born one day and died the following.  I know not how far the Reader may be in sympathy with me; but more awful thoughts of rights conferred, of hopes awakened, of remembrances stealing away or vanishing, were imparted to my mind by that inscription there before my eyes than by any other that it has ever been my lot to meet with upon a tomb-stone.

The most numerous class of sepulchral inscriptions do indeed record nothing else but the name of the buried person; but that he was born upon one day and died upon another.  Addison in the Spectator making this observation says, ’that he cannot look upon those registers of existence, whether of brass or marble, but as a kind of satire upon the departed persons who had left no other memorial of them than that they were born and that they died.’  In certain moods of mind this is a natural reflection; yet not perhaps the most salutary which the appearance might give birth to.  As in these registers the name is mostly associated with others of the same family, this is a prolonged companionship, however shadowy:  even a tomb like this is a shrine to which the fancies of a scattered family may return in pilgrimage; the thoughts of the individuals without any communication with each other must oftentimes meet here.  Such a frail memorial then is not without its tendency to keep families together.  It feeds also local attachment, which is the tap-root of the tree of Patriotism.

I know not how I can withdraw more satisfactorily from this long disquisition than by offering to the Reader as a farewell memorial the following Verses, suggested to me by a concise epitaph which I met with some time ago in one of the most retired vales among the mountains of Westmoreland.  There is nothing in the detail of the poem which is not either founded upon the epitaph or gathered from enquiries concerning the deceased, made in the neighbourhood.