Wordsworth as the coming poet of America. He had written some noble
verse, but wilted beneath the scathing criticism of Edgar Allan Poe,[1]
and after becoming a clergyman published little poetry. This epitaph
alone, however, fully justifies Dr. Lord's earlier ambition, for no poet
of his time could have included more of beauty and truth and pathos
within the compass of so brief an inscription.

In a comment upon the placing of this tablet, Mrs. Clark afterward
wrote: "The position of the stone is misleading, and gives one an idea
that the mound contains the bones--whereas they are buried at the foot
of the mound. I have sometimes wondered if this rather curiously shaped
mound, with the two maple trees thereon, might not contain undisturbed
skeletons; and I feel sure that throughout this strip of land, which the
grading only superficially disturbed, there are many bones of the
Iroquois, for in 1900, when we cut down some trees, a skull was found in
the fork of a root."

Mrs. Clark's record shows that the mound existed prior to 1874, and
since this particular corner of ground was unoccupied before that date
except, for a period, by the barns and stables of Lakelands across the
way, it is reasonable to suppose that the mound was made by the Indians.
While the mounds of New York State cannot be compared in size and extent
with those of the West, writers on Indian antiquities, from
Schoolcraft[2] onward, have identified as the work of red men many such
formations within the Empire State. The mounds were commonly used by the
Indians as places of burial, and sometimes as sites for houses, or as
fortifications.[3] The mound in Fernleigh-Over may be reasonably
regarded as a monument erected by the Indians to the memory of their
dead.