Jonathan Smith

Betsy and Al McKee

In memory of
MR. JONATHAN SMITH,
born the 21st February
AD 1733 and departed
this life April 1st AD
1795

“Here, fond man!
Behold thy pictur’d life; pass some few years
Thy flowering SPRING, thy SUMMER’s ardent strength,
Thy sober AUTUMN fading into age,
And pale concluding WINTER comes at last
And shuts the scene.”  

For me, this epitaph is a remarkable find, and I am grateful to the McKees for sharing their image with me. The source is Winter, one of the four blank-verse poems of The Seasons by James Tomson (1700-1748). Like Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, The Seasons (1726/1730) is an example of a work of literature that was tremendously popular in its day, but now is practically unknown. Tomson’s long and ambitious work contemplates each of the four seasons in turn, drawing moral lessons from the power of nature in each season, the progression for one to the next, and the influence of the seasons on the lives of women and men, in the country and in the city. Though its reputation has suffered, and Tomson’s style is now often dismissed as overly convoluted, it was widely read for more than a century in Britain, continental Europe, and America. Given his wide readership, I expected to find him quoted often in these burying grounds, but this is the first and so far the only epitaph from The Seasons I have encountered.

The passage on Jonathan Smith’s stone is very much in the tradition of epitaphs that remind the reader of the brevity of life, and warn us not to be distracted by the vain pleasures of this world but rather to spend our time preparing ourselves for the next. The lines that immediately follow in Winter reinforce the point:

Ah! whither now are fled
Those dreams of greatness? those unsolid hopes
Of happiness? those longings after fame?
Those restless cares? those busy bustling days?
Those gay-spent festive nights? those veering thoughts,
Lost between good and ill, that shared thy life?
All now are vanish’d! Virtue sole survives,
Immortal, never-failing friend of man,
His guide to happiness on high.

Smith, or his survivors, must have had a copy of Winter, read these lines, and been deeply moved by them.