Superseded by May Sinclair

By daylight there is neither glamour nor beauty in the great burying-ground of North London; you must go to it at evening, in the first fall of the summer dusk, to feel the fascination of that labyrinth of low graves, crosses and headstones, urns and sarcophagi, crowded in the black-green of the grass; of marble columns, granite pyramids and obelisks, massed and reared and piled in the grey of the air. It is nothing if not fantastic. Even by day that same mad grouping and jostling of monumental devices, gathered together from the ends of the world, gives to the place a cheerful half-pagan character; now, in its confusion and immensity, it might be some city of dreams, tossed up in cloud and foam and frozen into marble; some aerial half-way limbo where life slips a little from the living and death from the dead.

For these have their own way here. No priest interferes with them, and whatever secular power ordains these matters is indulgent to its children. If one of them would have his horse or his dog carved on his tomb instead of an angel, or a pair of compasses instead of a cross, there is no one to thwart his fancy. He may even be humorous if he will. It is as if he implored us to laugh with him a little while though the jest be feeble, and not to chill him with so many tears.