Mt. Auburn

Mount Auburn Cemetery is a true wonder! We decided to check it out on a beautiful summer weekend and were in awe of the natural beauty combined with weathered statues and the feeling of peace and safety. We walked around admiring different structures and wondering what happened between the numbers on the stones. Some of the people buried at Mount Auburn led quite extraordinary lives and made an impact which will continue to carry to future generations.

In case anyone is wondering, I do believe in angels.

Tribute to Notable Figures at Mount Auburn Cemetery

Some very famous and important people are buried at this gorgeous landmark, so here's my acknowledgment for some of those whom I especially admire.

*Edwin H. Land (1909 - 1991), inventor, photography pioneer

The Land Camera (I actually have one with a flash in my collection :)

*Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840 - 1924), art patron

*Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809 - 1894), author and poet

                                 OUR INDIAN SUMMER (1892)

You'll believe me, dear boys, 't is a pleasure to rise, 

With a welcome like this in your darling old eyes; 

To meet the same smiles and to hear the same tone 

Which have greeted me oft in the years that have flown. 

Were I gray as the grayest old rat in the wall,

My locks would turn brown at the sight of you all;

If my heart were as dry as the shell on the sand,

It would fill like the goblet I hold in my hand.

There are noontides of autumn when summer returns.

Though the leaves are all garnered and sealed in their urns,

And the bird on his perch, that was silent so long,

Believes the sweet sunshine and breaks into song.

 

We have caged the young birds of our beautiful June;

Their plumes are still bright and their voices in tune;

One moment of sunshine from faces like these

And they sing as they sung in the green-growing trees.

 

The voices of morning! how sweet is their thrill

When the shadows have turned, and the evening grows still!

The text of our lives may get wiser with age,

But the print was so fair on its twentieth page!

 

Look off from your goblet and up from your plate,

Come, take the last journal, and glance at its date:

Then think what we fellows should say and should do,

If the 6 were a 9 and the 5 were a 2.

 

Ah, no! for the shapes that would meet with us here,

From the far land of shadows, are ever too dear!

Though youth flung around us its pride and its charms,

We should see but the comrades we clasped in our arms.

 

A health to our future -- a sigh for our past,

We love, we remember, we hope to the last;

And for all the base lies that the almanacs hold,

While we've youth in our hearts we can never grow old!

*Winslow Homer (1836 - 1910), artist

 Snap the Whip, 1872

Crab Fishing

Waiting On The Return Of the Fishing Fleet

*Harriet Jacobs (1813 - 1897), author and abolitionist. 

Wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861.

*Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 - 1882), poet. Wrote Paul Revere's Ride.

 A Day Of Sunshine. (Birds Of Passage, Flight The Second)

O gift of God! O perfect day:
Whereon shall no man work, but play;
Whereon it is enough for me,
Not to be doing, but to be!

Through every fibre of my brain,
Through every nerve, through every vein,
I feel the electric thrill, the touch
Of life, that seems almost too much.

I hear the wind among the trees
Playing celestial symphonies;
I see the branches downward bent,
Like keys of some great instrument.

And over me unrolls on high
The splendid scenery of the sky,
Where though a sapphire sea the sun
Sails like a golden galleon,

Towards yonder cloud-land in the West,
Towards yonder Islands of the Blest,
Whose steep sierra far uplifts
Its craggy summits white with drifts.

Blow, winds! and waft through all the rooms
The snow-flakes of the cherry-blooms!
Blow, winds! and bend within my reach
The fiery blossoms of the peach!

O Life and Love! O happy throng
Of thoughts, whose only speech is song!
O heart of man! canst thou not be
Blithe as the air is, and as free?

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

*Charles Dana Gibson (1867 - 1944), artist

Their First Quarrel, 1914

"Mount Auburn Cemetery has been designated a National Historic Landmark by the Department of the Interior, recognizing it as one of the country's most significant cultural landscapes. Founded in 1831, it was the first large-scale designed landscape open to the public in the United States. Today its beauty, historical associations and horticultural collections are internationally renowned."

-via http://www.mountauburn.org/national_landmark/history.cfm

And the beautiful signs for the clever pathway names caught my attention... 

and reminded me of special someones.

Mount Auburn Cemetery is full of enchantment and history, 

along with a peaceful reminder that to everything, there is a season.