A rural Cemetery seems to combine in itself all the advantages, which can be proposed to gratify human feelings, or tranquilize human fears; to secure the best religious influences, and to cherish all those associations, which cast a cheerful light over the darkness of the grave.
And what spot can be more appropriate than this, for such a purpose? Nature seems to point it out with significant energy, as the favorite retirement for the dead. There are all around us the varied features of her beauty and grandeur – the forest-crowned height; the deep glen; the grassy glade; and the silent grove. Here are the lofty oak, the beech, that “wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,” the rustling pine, and the drooping willow; – the tree, that sheds its pale leaves with every autumn, a fit emblem of our own transitory bloom; and the evergreen, with its perennial shoots, instructing us, that “the wintry blast of death kills not the buds of virtue.”
Excerpted from ‘Of Useful Knowledge. Cemetery of Mount Auburn.’ appearing in American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, edited by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Boston Bewick Co., 1839.