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“LINES, Written on seeing the monument to the memory of David Hume at Edinburgh,” Ladies’ Garland and Family Wreath Embracing Tales, Sketches, Incidents, History, Poetry, Music, etc, vol. 4, no. 10 (October 1850), p. 114.
Anonymous
Ladies’ Garland and Family Wreath was published in Philadelphia from 1837 to 1850. Hume’s tomb was designed by his architectural friend and fellow Scot, Robert Adam (1728–92), in 1777. It was erected in the Old Calton Burial Ground on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill, and then it was the only monument on the Hill, a thumb in the eye to pious Edinburgh. When I visited it for the first time in the late 1990s, it had fallen into a state of sad disrepair. It has since been restored so today’s visitors may once again capture a sense of its original dignity. Hume had directed in his will that a “Monument be built over my Body at an Expence not exceeding a hundred Pounds, with an Inscription containing only my Name with the Year of my Birth and Death, leaving it to Posterity to add the Rest.” Beneath this poet’s “LINES” lay a much more complicated tale of a hundred years worth of the dissemination of Hume’s writings and the ideas they contained. Travelling back and forth and within the British Atlantic world, their movement was often in revised forms and always within contexts that had changed and were changing. While these simple lines are as appropriate a place as any to conclude this volume on Hume’s Reception in Early America, all who read them are, in a way, parts of that still-unfolding story.
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L I N E S,
Written on seeing the monument to the memory of David Hume at Edinburgh.
I NEVER looked upon the tomb
Erected there to DAVID HUME,
Without reflecting——Did not he,
With all his deep philosophy,
Deliberately try to load
The minds of men with doubts of GOD?
To poison, at the fountain’s source,
The stream of life, throughout its course?
To dash from suffering moral’s lip,
The cup of comfort he would sip?
To substitute for future life,
A present scene of anxious strife?
To tell us the oblivious wave
Will roll upon the new-made grave?
To steal from man those brilliant hopes
Which thro’ life’s darkness sweetly shine,
Exalting our imperfect state
Into a character divine?
He did; and, with his latest breath,
Proclaimed an everlasting death!
Like Eden’s serpent would destroy
What he, himself, could not enjoy.
Yet, strange to say, that very HUME
Was honored with a splendid tomb.