Love Wells

Author’s Collection

In Memory of MRS LOVE Wife of
MR STEPHEN WELLS,
who died Octr 12th 1786
in the 29th Year of her Age.

 Let this and every other grave
A warning be to all who live
Gods friendship to ensure on Earth
That you may die a peacefull death
This truly may of her be said
Whose Body in the Grave is laid
To such will death a blessing prove
Ope wide the gates to joys above

Isn’t this stone an altogether wonderful piece of work?

Look at those very stylized wings and an impressive crown on the soul of Love Wells, shown confidently on its way to glory.

That sentiment, that statement of Love Wells’s rectitude, is completely reinforced by the epitaph, which appears to be an original composition.  It starts with that language of the Classic, that the grave must be a warning to the living…but as long as you live virtuously, in friendship with God, then you will have a peaceful death and pass through the gates to eternal joy.

All in all, this is a wonderful, original articulation of the attitude that for the righteous, death is a blessing, not something to be feared.

It is a point worth emphasizing, looking at this stone and the last one, and comparing them to the stern warning of The Classic. These Congregationalists were constantly wrestling with these two conflicting attitudes towards death:  They were gripped individually and collectively by an intense and unremitting fear of what might happen after death, while simultaneously clinging to the Christian view of death as a release and relief for the earth-bound soul. A lot has been written about these contemporaneous, conflicting attitudes and how they played out in sermons and religious writing – I see the same struggle recorded in gravestones,

In the case of Love Wells, I see the two attitudes merging into a synthesis.