We ate dinner yesterday in London at the Cafe in the Crypt in St Martin-in-the-Fields, beside Trafalgar Square, which is a restaurant in an actual crypt.
In addition to eating potatoes and paninins, we toured the crypt, which still features some of the stones of those originally interred there.
Their remains have since been reinterred, but oddly, many of the monuments remain.
Many of them are more than 400 years old.
The one I liked best was in honor of Maria Augusta Murray, who died at age 30 in 1840.
First, it contains an image, presumably of Maria, which I like a lot.
We should put more faces on gravestones, I think. A face can tell you a lot. Also, I think it would make cemeteries far more interesting.
But it’s the inscription that I really love.
It reads:
Sacred to the memory of Maria Augusta Murray
Born May 1st, 1810 Died March 26th 1840
If e’er pure spirit rose onto the skies,
wafted to heaven on friendship’s deep-drawn sighs,
her pious soul to God hath wing’d its flight,
and left behind but sorrow, gloom and night.
Someone really leaned into Maria’s inscription.
“Wafted to heaven on friendship’s deep-drawn sighs?”
Damn.
The whole thing is dripping with lament, admiration, and adoration.
And it rhymes!
I wish I knew if a loved one wrote the inscription or the family hired a poet to write it on their behalf. Sadly, no records of Maria Augusta Murray exist other than what is included on the monument, making it even more valuable.
She would be utterly forgotten to the world today if not for this stone. Even so, it says so little.
Death sucks on so many levels.
The inscription is doubly impressive, given that Maria sadly never had a chance to read it herself.
A good rule of thumb:
When you do something exceedingly kind or overly generous for someone without any hope of receiving even an ounce of credit or anything in return, you know that the act was truly done out of the goodness of the heart.
