Often with an artist 's pride the good old sculptor would speak of favorite productions of his skill which were scattered throughout the village graveyards of New England . But my chief and most instructive amusement was to witness his interviews with his customers , who held interminable consultations about the form and fashion of the desired monuments , the buried excellence to be commemorated , the anguish to be expressed , and finally the lowest price in dollars and cents for which a marble transcript of their feelings might be obtained . Really , my mind received many fresh ideas which perhaps may remain in it even longer than Mr. Wigglesworth 's hardest marble will retain the deepest strokes of his chisel . An elderly lady came to bespeak a monument for her first love , who had been killed by a whale in the Pacific Ocean no less than forty years before . It was singular that so strong an impression of early feeling should have survived through the changes of her subsequent life , in the course of which she had been a wife and a mother , and , so far as I could judge , a comfortable and happy woman . Reflecting within myself , it appeared to me that this lifelong sorrow -- as , in all good faith , she deemed it -- was one of the most fortunate circumstances of her history . It had given an ideality to her mind ; it had kept her purer and less earthy than she would otherwise have been by drawing a portion of her sympathies apart from earth . Amid the throng of enjoyments and the pressure of worldly care and all the warm materialism of this life she had communed with a vision , and had been the better for such intercourse . Faithful to the husband of her maturity , and loving him with a far more real affection than she ever could have felt for this dream of her girlhood , there had still been an imaginative faith to the ocean-buried ; so that an ordinary character had thus been elevated and refined . Her sighs had been the breath of Heaven to her soul . The good lady earnestly desired that the proposed monument should be ornamented with a carved border of marine plants interwined with twisted sea-shells , such as were probably waving over her lover 's skeleton or strewn around it in the far depths of the Pacific . But , Mr. Wigglesworth 's chisel being inadequate to the task , she was forced to content herself with a rose hanging its head from a broken stem . After her departure I remarked that the symbol was none of the most apt . `` And yet , '' said my friend the sculptor , embodying in this image the thoughts that had been passing through my own mind , `` that broken rose has shed its sweet smell through forty years of the good woman 's life . '' It was seldom that I could find such pleasant food for contemplation as in the above instance . None of the applicants , I think , affected me more disagreeably than an old man who came , with his fourth wife hanging on his arm , to bespeak gravestones for the three former occupants of his marriage-bed . I watched with some anxiety to see whether his remembrance of either were more affectionate than of the other two , but could discover no symptom of the kind . The three monuments were all to be of the same material and form , and each decorated in bas-relief with two weeping willows , one of these sympathetic trees bending over its fellow , which was to be broken in the midst and rest upon a sepulchral urn . This , indeed , was Mr. Wigglesworth 's standing emblem of conjugal bereavement . I shuddered at the gray polygamist who had so utterly lost the holy sense of individuality in wedlock that methought he was fain to reckon upon his fingers how many women who had once slept by his side were now sleeping in their graves .
There was even -- if I wrong him , it is no great matter -- a glance sidelong at his living spouse , as if he were inclined to drive a thriftier bargain by bespeaking four XXXXX in a lot .
Pacific Wigglesworth emblem first fourth girlhood gravestones ideality sea-shells whale