Down the country road, behind the hilltop wall, hidden in the high grass near the white-spired church, not hard to find but rarely visited, lie the burying grounds of New England. No book, no building, no monument has quite their power to suggest the American past. For here, as the quick confront the dead almost face to face, so to speak, the years fall away, and over the abyss of change and lost belief the visitor senses the uncompromising faith, the appalling death rate, and the grim good humor with which this new Zion met life and death. Those given to macabre poetry, a crude, strong art form, and a sense of historical continuity will not find cemetery visiting in New England a dissatisfying experience. (In the Puritan presence, one shrinks from calling it a hobby.)

The ancient markers—all too often sinking, tilted, or broken—are gradually disappearing. Lichen and moss obscure the dimming letters. Of the earliest tombstones, from the ißoo’s, most have been shattered by the New England winters. And the eighteenth and nineteenth century markers are giving ground as well.

Apart from the natural breaking down of stone with time, the principal villain is seeping moisture, freezing and expanding. Some conscientious custodians protect damaged headstones in beds of concrete, or hammer lead sheaths over the edges. But in most cases the old stones simply split and drop their death’s-heads and epitaphs which warn so eloquently: “As I am now, so you must be …”

A visit to these graveyards is its own reward, quite in keeping with the spirit of the old Puritans and early New Englanders who loved nothing better than tribute and warning combined—two birds brought low with the same philosophical stone. Epitaph hunting not only arouses a strange affinity with the past; it also helps to deflate the ego.

The late Harriette Merrifield Forbes—mother of the distinguished novelist and historian Esther Forbes —was the nation’s leading investigator of old New England tombstones. She found none of the harsh starkness of death among them. The reason, she wrote, was that the “other-worldly Puritan accepted death with such passionate faith in a better world to come that we may believe that his fears were quieted. His sunny hillside burying-grounds with their carved stones remain … peaceful and blessed spots.”

The early markers are of fieldstone; freestone; syenite; greenstone (a porphyrilic stone also called beechbowlder); schist; marble; or a flinty slate that offered the most satisfactory smooth surface for the cutter’s chisel. Most stone came from the New England quarries, some of which were undercut as early as 1630.

Sometimes early tombstones essayed the primitive sculpture of laces, the likeness—oltcn the only one on earth—of the man beneath, and did it with no little skill. But the general rule is symbolism, cut with broad and obvious strokes. In an era when many were unable to read or write, the gap was bridged with pictures. The theory was simple: while honoring the dead, forewarn the living.