O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching Earth;Lie close around her; leave no room for mirthWith its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs.She hath no questions, she hath no replies.

EMBALM, v.i. To cheat vegetation by locking up the gases upon which it feeds. By embalming their dead and thereby deranging the natural balance between animal and vegetable life, the Egyptians made their once fertile and populous country barren and incapable of supporting more than a meagre crew. The modern metallic burial casket is a step in the same direction, and many a dead man who ought now to be ornamenting his neighbour's lawn as a tree, or enriching his table as a bunch of radishes, is doomed to a long inutility. We shall get him after awhile if we are spared, but in the meantime, the violet and rose are languishing for a nibble at his gluteus maximus.

Would people be excited about your departure from the earth or they would wish you should come back again and again if possible?

There would be a black, six-foot-deep gap hacked in the hard ground. That shadow would marry this shadow, and the peculiar, yellowish soil of our locality seal the wound in the whiteness, and yet another snowfall erase the traces of newness in Joan's grave.

Heap not on this mound Roses that she loved so well; Why bewilder her with roses, That she cannot see or smell?

A cemetery saddens us because it is the only place of the world in which we do not meet our dead again.

They were together now in the vault under the tombstone; their ashes were, with the remains of those of their children who were not buried elsewhere, although all their names were incised on the stone.

The marble keeps merely a cold and sad memory of a man who would else be forgotten. No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one.

It makes small difference to the dead, if they are buried in the tokens of luxury. All this is an empty glorification left for those who live.

Epitaph, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.

Nature is honest, we aren't; we embalm our dead.

The graveyard is about fifty by a hundred yards inside a wire fence. There are almost no trees in it: a lemon verbena and a small magnolia; it is all red clay and very few weeds.

Ritual disposal of the dead speaks clearly of an awareness of death, and thus an awareness of self.