Yet there was one thing I felt I would have had otherwise; it
seemed to me that the flat stones of the pavement are a weight too heavy
and too cold to be laid on the breast of a lover of nature and the
beautiful. The green turf, springing with flowers, that lies above a
grave, does not seem, to us so hopeless a barrier between us and what
was warm and loving; the springing grass and daisies there seem, types
and assurances that the mortal beneath shall put on immortality; they
come up to us as kind messages from the peaceful dust, to say that it is
resting in a certain hope of a glorious resurrection.

On the cold flagstones, walled in by iron railings, there were no
daisies and no moss; but I picked many of both from, the green turf
around, which, with some sprigs of ivy from the walls, I send you.

It is strange that we turn away from the grave of this man, who achieved
to himself the most brilliant destiny that ever an author did,--raising
himself by his own unassisted efforts to be the chosen companions of
nobles and princes, obtaining all that heart could desire of riches and
honor,--we turn away and say, Poor Walter Scott! How desolately touching
is the account in Lockhart, of his dim and indistinct agony the day his
wife was brought here to be buried! and the last part of that biography
is the saddest history that I know; it really makes us breathe a long
sigh of relief when we read of the lowering of the coffin into this
vault.

What force does all this give to the passage in his diary in which he
records his estimate of life!--"What is this world? a dream within a
dream. As we grow older, each step is an awakening. The youth awakes, as
he thinks, from childhood; the full-grown man despises the pursuits of
youth as visionary; the old man looks on manhood as a feverish dream.
The grave the last sleep? No; it is the last and final awakening."

It has often been remarked, that there is no particular moral purpose
aimed at by Scott in his writings; he often speaks of it himself in his
last days, in a tone of humility. He represents himself as having been
employed mostly in the comparatively secondary department of giving
innocent amusement. He often expressed, humbly and earnestly, the hope
that he had, at least, done no harm; but I am inclined to think, that
although moral effect was not primarily his object, yet the influence of
his writings and whole existence on earth has been decidedly good.

It is a great