In memory of Miss Me-
hetebel daught to Mr.
Nathan and Mrs. Phebe
Adams, who departed
this life August 11th. AD
1787, in ye. 16th. Year
of her age.
All, all on earth, is shadow,
all beyond in substance;
the reverse is folly’s creed:
How solid all, where change
shall be no more.
The source if from the First Night of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts. The narrator wakes “emerging from a sea of dreams tumultuous” to look out into the dark, still night. He hears a bell toll one, and hears it as “the knell of my departed hours... My hopes and fears start up alarm’d, and o’er life’s narrow verge look down – on what? a fathomless abyss. A dread eternity!” Thus begins his long contemplation of the impermanence of our giddy, vain, worldly joys and the infinitely greater joys that reason and religion assure us are to come:
Yet man, fool man! here buries all his thoughts,
Inters celestial hopes without one sigh.
Pris’ner of earth, and pent beneath the moon,
Here pinions all his wishes...
And is it in the flight of threescore years
To push eternity from human thought,
And smother souls immortal in the dust?
... How was my heart incrusted by the world!
O how self-fetter’d was my grov’ling soul!
How, like a worm, was I wrapt round and round
In silken though, which reptile Fancy spun,
Till darken’d Reason lay quite clouded o’er,
With soft conceit of endless comfort here,
Nor yet put forth his wings to reach the skies!
As you can see, the epitaph chosen for young Mehetebel Adams fits perfectly within this context. As I said in the overview section, Edward Young’s Night Thoughts was extremely popular at their time, their great rolling cadences providing a welcome respite from dry theological tracts – though conveying the same essential lessons of preparedness and devotion.
