The sketch-book of Geoffrey Crayon, gent[pseud.] together with Abbotsford and other selections from the writings of Washington Irving .. . y of twilight. The chapels and aisles grew darker anddarker. The effigies of the kings faded into shadows; themarble figures of the monuments assumed strange shapesin the uncertain light; the eveningbreeze creptthrough the aisleslike the cold breathof the grave; andeven the distantfootfall of a verger,traversing thePoets Corner, hadsomething strangeand dreary in itssound. I slowlyretraced my morn-ings walk, and asI passed out at theportal of the clois-ters,
The sketch-book of Geoffrey Crayon, gent[pseud.] together with Abbotsford and other selections from the writings of Washington Irving .. . y of twilight. The chapels and aisles grew darker anddarker. The effigies of the kings faded into shadows; themarble figures of the monuments assumed strange shapesin the uncertain light; the eveningbreeze creptthrough the aisleslike the cold breathof the grave; andeven the distantfootfall of a verger,traversing thePoets Corner, hadsomething strangeand dreary in itssound. I slowlyretraced my morn-ings walk, and asI passed out at theportal of the clois-ters, the door,closing with a jar-ring noise behindme, filled the wholebuilding withechoes. endeavoredto form some ar-rangement in my mind of the objects I had been contem-plating but found they were already fallen into indistinctnessand confusion. Names, inscriptions, trophies, had all becomeconfounded in my recollection, though I had scarcely taken myfoot from off the threshold. What, thought I, is this vastassemblage of sepulchres but a treasury of humiliation; a hugepile of reiterated homilies on the emptiness of renown, and the. Tomb of Edward the Confessor 148 THE SKETCH-BOOK certainty of oblivion! It is, indeed, the empire of death —his great shadowy palace, where he sits in state, mocking atthe relics of human glory, and spreading dust and forgetful-ness on the monuments of princes. How idle a boast, afterall, is the immortality of a name. Time is ever silently turn-ing over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the storyof the present, to think of the characters and anecdotes thatgave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrownaside to be speedily forgotten. The idol of to-day pushes thehero of yesterday out of our recollection; and will, in turn,be supplanted by his successor of to-morrow. * Our fathers,says Sir Thomas Browne, find their graves in our shortmemories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our sur-vivors. History fades into fable; fact
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