Caroline Hunt and Mary Mather

Author’s Collection

CAROLINE S.
WIFE OF
IRA P. HUNT.
DIED
July 23, 1852
AE. 41 Ys.

 As you are now so once was I,
As I am now so you must be,
Prepare for death and follow me.

This version dispenses with the usual call for us, the readers, to stop and heed.  Here the speaker jumps right into the message. 

1852 seems late for such a pure, old-school version of The Classic. Note the beautiful willow-and-urn design, typical of the mid-nineteenth century and associated more with melancholy mourning than the old Calvinist preoccupation with the risk of imminent damnation. This stone really does co-join two very different New England graveyard traditions for expressing emotions on the occasion of the death of a loved one.

Author’s Collection

In memory of
MARY. wife of
Roger. Mather.
who died
July 24, 1825
aged 53.

Could you but know as much as I
How soon you would prepare to die.

What an astonishing message from beyond the grave this is!  The speaker has already exchanged worlds, and knows her fate.  If you only knew what I now know, she warns, you would change your ways immediately, stop distracting yourselves with the bright toys of this vain world, and make ourselves ready for eternity.  A remarkably potent little two-line composition.It is original as far as I can tell; I have not found it anywhere else.

As with the Caroline Hunt stone, the combination of old-style Classic epitaph with the gentler urn-and-willow motive is noteworthy.