Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Olde Cambridge

[10] results of their walnutting or chestnutting; or possibly a defiant nap might be there indulged. I have often wished that I had learned from Lowell on which of them he sat during that Hallowe'en night when he watched there vainly for ghosts.

Only one of these longer epitaphs was in English; and the frequent “Eheu,” or “O spes inanis,” in the others, made us feel that emotion as well as accuracy might exist in Latin. Modern cemeteries never seem to me very aweinspiring; but the old New England graveyards, especially in college towns, impressed on the boyish mind not only the dignity of virtue, but of knowledge; of this world's honors and grandeurs perhaps, but never of its financial treasures. I can find only one epitaph in the Cambridge churchyard which mentions that the person commemorated was a man of wealth; and that is on the grave of a non-collegiate man, whose inscription is in English. But we noticed that at the end of the tombstone of the Rev. Samuel Appleton, after all the sonorous Latin the climax came in those superb words from the English Vulgate: “They that be wise shall shine ”