In
proportion as people grow polite they cease to be poetical. They
talk of poetry, but they have learnt to check its free impulses,
to distrust its sallying emotions, and to supply its most
affecting and picturesque usages by studied form and pompous
ceremonial. Few pageants can be more stately and frigid than an
English funeral in town. It is made up of show and gloomy parade:
mourning carriages, mourning horses, mourning plumes, and
hireling mourners, who make a mockery of grief. "There is a grave
digged," says Jeremy Taylor, "and a solemn mourning, and a great
talk in the neighborhood, and when the daies are finished, they
shall be, and they shall be remembered no more." The associate in
the gay and crowded city is soon forgotten; the hurrying
succession of new intimates and new pleasures effaces him from
our minds, and the very scenes and circles in which he moved are
incessantly fluctuating. But funerals in the country are solemnly
impressive. The stroke of death makes a wider space in the
village circle, and is an awful event in the tranquil uniformity
of rural life. The passing bell tolls its knell in every ear; it
steals with its pervading melancholy over hill and vale, and
saddens all the landscape.
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