Page:Annalsoffaminein00nich.djvu/270

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CHAPTER VIII.

"Oh! could we from death but recover."

THE GRAVE OF CHARLES WOLFE.

It was in the cottage of Dr. Power that unexpectedly the sweet strains of the "Soldier's Grave" were struck by Mrs. P., and awakened again those sensations which were stirred, when in the city of New York, a few days before sailing for Ireland, I heard them for the first time; and here was told that the author was sleeping in a humble burying-ground but two miles from the spot.

In two days Mrs. P. accompanied me to the strangers' churchyard adjoining an old crumbling ivy-covered ruin of a church, where sleep together in a rank grass-grown spot, the sailor and the soldier who dies from home, in this harbor, and where seldom a foot tramples on the wild weed that grows tall in the uneven inclosure where they sleep. Here and there a coarse monument tells that Captain M., or Lieutenant G. died in this harbor, Anno Domini, ———, but Charles Wolfe was not among them, his was a bed detached, and confined within the wall of one corner of the church, with a humble flat stone over his breast. The roof of