And now to the eastward the stars are no longer innumerable, and the sky grows wan.  Then a faint silvery mist appears above the housetops, and at last in the midst of this there comes a brilliantly shining line—­the upper edge of the rising moon.

THE MODE IN MONUMENTS

STRAY THOUGHTS IN HIGHGATE CEMETERY

On a sharp, sunlight morning, when the white clouds are drifting swiftly across the luminous blue sky, there is no finer walk about London than the Highgate ridge.  One may stay awhile on the Archway looking down upon the innumerable roofs of London stretching southward into the haze, and shining here and there with the reflection of the rising sun, and then wander on along the picturesque road by the college of Saint Aloysius to the new Catholic church, and so through the Waterlow Park to the cemetery.  The Waterlow Park is a pleasant place, full of children and aged persons in perambulators during the middle hours of the day, and in the summer evening time a haunt of young lovers; but your early wanderer finds it solitary save for Vertumnus, who, with L.C.C. on the front of him, is putting in crocuses.  So we wander down to the little red lodge, whence a sinuous road runs to Hampstead, and presently into the close groves of monuments that whiten the opposite slope.

How tightly these white sepulchres are packed here!  How different this congestion of sorrow from the mossy latitude of God’s Acre in the country!  The dead are crammed together as closely as the living seemed in that bird’s-eye view from the Archway.  There is no ample shadow of trees, no tangled corners where mother earth may weave flower garlands over her returning children.  The monuments positively jostle and elbow each other for frontage upon the footways.  And they are so rawly clean and assertive.  Most of them are conspicuously new whitened, with freshly-blackened or newly-gilt inscriptions, bare of lichen, moss, or mystery, and altogether so restless that it seems to the meditative man that the struggle for existence, for mere standing room and a show in the world, still rages among the dead.  The unstable slope of the hill, with its bristling array of obelisks, crosses and urns, craning one above another, is as directly opposed to the restfulness of the village churchyard with its serene outspreading yews as midday Fleet Street to a Sabbath evening amidst the Sussex hills.  This cemetery is, indeed, a veritable tumult of tombs.

Another thing that presently comes painfully home to one is the lack of individuality among all these dead.  Not a necessary lack of individuality so much as a deliberate avoidance of it.  As one wanders along the steep, narrow pathways one is more and more profoundly impressed by the wholesale flavour of the mourning, the stereotyping of the monuments.  The place is too modern for memento mori and the hour-glass and the skull.  Instead, Slap & Dash, that excellent firm of monumental masons, everywhere crave to be remembered.  Truly, the firm of Slap & Dash have much to answer for among these graves, and they do not seem to be ashamed of it.