eanest 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
confusion. Names, inscriptions, trophies, had all become confounded in my
recollection, tho I had scarcely taken my foot from off the threshold.
What, thought I, is this vast assemblage of sepulchers but a treasury of
humiliation; a huge pile of reiterated homilies on the emptiness of renown
and the certainty of oblivion! It is, indeed, the empire of death; his
great shadowy palace, where he sits in state, mocking at the relics of
human glory, and spreading dust and forgetfulness on the monuments of
princes. How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time
is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the
story of the present, to think of the characters and anecdotes that gave
interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside to be speedily
forgotten. The idol of to-day pushes the hero of yesterday out of our
recollection; and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor of
to-morrow.

"Our fathers," says Sir Thomas Browne, "find their graves in our short
memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors."
History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy;
the inscription molders from the tablet; the statue falls from the
pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and
their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust? What is the security
of a tomb, or the perpetuity of an embalmment? The remains of Alexander
the Great have been scattered to the wind, and his empty sarcophagus is
now the mere curiosity of