the sepulchers of various kings and queens. From this eminence the eye
looks down between pillars and funeral trophies to the chapels and
chambers below, crowded with tombs; where warriors, prelates, courtiers
and statesmen lie moldering in their "beds of darkness." Close by me stood
the great chair of coronation, rudely carved of oak, in the barbarous
taste of a remote and Gothic age. The scene seemed almost as if contrived,
with theatrical artifice, to produce an effect upon the beholder. Here was
a type of the beginning and the end of human pomp and power; here it was
literally but a step from the throne to the sepulcher. Would not one think
that these incongruous mementos had been gathered together as a lesson to
living greatness, to show it, even in the moment of its proudest
exaltation, the neglect and dishonor to which it must soon arrive; how
soon that crown which encircles its brow must pass away, and it must lie
down in the dust and disgraces of the tomb, and be trampled upon by the
feet of the meanest of the multitude?...

The last beams of day were now faintly streaming through the painted
windows in the high vaults above me; the lower parts of the abbey were
already wrapt in the obscurity of twilight. The chapels and aisles grew
darker and darker. The effigies of the kings faded into shadows; the
marble figures of the monuments assumed strange shapes in the uncertain
light; the evening breeze crept through the aisles like the cold breath of
the grave; and even the distant footfall of a verger, traversing the
Poet's Corner, had something strange and dreary in its sound. I slowly
retraced my morning's walk, and as I passed out at the portal of the
cloisters the door, closing with a jarring noise behind me, filled the
whole building with echoes.

I endeavored to form some arrangement in my mind of the objects I had been
contemplating, but found they were already fallen into indistinctness and