то CAROLINE BOWLES. Could I look forward to a distant day ROBERT SOUTHEY. Keswick, 21 Feb., 1829. * All for Love, or a Sinner well saved. CHAPTERS ON CHURCHYARDS. CHAPTER I. MANY are the idle tourists who have babbled of country churchyards many are the able pens which have been employed on the same subjects. One in particular, in the delightful olio of the "Sketch-book," has traced a picture so true to nature, so beautifully simple and pathetic, that succeeding essayists might well despair of success in attempting similar descriptions, were not the theme, in fact, inexhaustible, a source of endless variety, a volume of instructive records, whereof those marked with least incident are yet replete with interest for that human being who stands alone amongst the quiet graves, musing on the mystery of his own existence, and on the past and present state of those poor relics of mortality which every where surround him, mouldering beneath his feet-mingling with the common soil-feeding the rank churchyard vegetation-once sentient like himself with vigorous life, subject to all the tumultuous passions that agitate his own heart, pregnant with a thousand busy schemes, elevated and depressed by alternate hopes and fears-liable, in a word, to all the pains, the pleasures, and "the ills, that flesh is heir to." The leisurely traveller arriving at a country inn, with the intention of tarrying a day, an hour, or a yet shorter period, in the town or village, generally finds time to saunter towards the church, and even to loiter about its surrounding graves, as if his nature (solitary in the midst of the living crowd) claimed affinity, and sought communion, with the populous dust beneath his feet. Such, at least, are the feelings with which I have often lingered in the churchyard of a strange place, and about the church itself to which, indeed, in all places, and in all countries, the heart of the Christian pilgrim feels itself attracted as towards his very home, for there at least, though alone amongst a strange people, he is no stranger : It is his Father's house. I am not sure that I heartily approve the custom-rare in this country, but frequent in many others of planting flowers and flowering shrubs about the graves. I am quite sure that I hate all the sentimental mummery with which the far-famed burying-place of the Pere la Chaise is garnished out. It is faithfully in keeping with Parisian taste, and perfectly in unison with French feeling; but I should wonder at the profound sympathy with which numbers of my own countrymen expatiate on that pleasure-ground of Death, if it were still possible to feel surprise at any instance of degenerate taste and perverted feeling in our travelled islanders-if it were not, too, the vulgarest thing in the world to wonder at any thing. The custom, so general in Switzerland, and so common in our own principality of Wales, of strewing flowers over the graves of departed friends, either on the anniversaries of their deaths, or on other memorable days, is touching and beautiful. Those frail blossoms scattered over the green sod, in their morning freshness, but for a little space retain their balmy odours, and their glowing tints, till the sun goes down, and the breeze of evening sighs over them, and the dews of night fall on their pale beauty, and the withered and fading wreath becomes a yet more appropriate tribute to the silent dust beneath. But rose-trees in full bloom, and tall staring lilies, and flaunting lilacs, and pert priggish spirafrutexes, are, methinks, ill in harmony with that holiness of perfect repose which should pervade the last resting-place of mortality. Even in our own unsentimental England, I have seen two or three of these flowerplot graves. One, in particular, I remember, had been planned and planted by a young disconsolate widow, to the memory of her deceased partner. The tomb itself was a common square erection of freestone, covered over with a slab of black marble, on which, under the name, age, &c., of the defunct, was engraven an elaborate epitaph, commemorating his many virtues, and pathetically intimating, that, at no distant period, the vacant space remaining on the same marble would receive the name of "his inconsola ble Eugenia. The tomb was hedged about by a basketwork of honey-suckles. A Persian lilac drooped over its foot, and, at the head, (substituted for the elegant cypress, coy denizen of our ungenial clime,) a young poplar perked up its pyramidical form. Divers other shrubs and flower. ing plants completed the ring-fence, plentifully interspersed with "the fragrant weed, the Frenchman's darling," whose perfume, when I visited the spot, was wafted over the whole churchyard. It was then the full flush of summer. The garden had been planted but a month; but the lady had tended, and propped, and watered those gay strangers with her own delicate hands, evermore in the dusk of evening returning to her tender task, so that they had taken. their removal kindly, and grew and flourished as carelessly round that cold marble, and in that field of graves, as they had done heretofore in their own sheltered nursery. A year afterwards-a year almost to a day--I stood once more on that same spot, in the same month-“the leafy month of June." But--it was leafless there. The young poplar still stood sentinel in its former station, but dry, withered, and sticky, like an old broom at the mast-head of a vessel on sale. The parson's cow, and his half score fatting wethers, had violated the sacred enclosure, and trodden down its flowery basket-work into the very soil. The plants and shrubs were nibbled down to miserable stumps, and from the sole survivor, the poor straggling lilac, a fat old waddling ewe had just cropped the last sickly flower-branch, and stood staring at me with a pathetic vacancy of counte |