As a specimen of these epitaphs, take the following, found in a bleak gorge of Chatham Isle:—­

  “Oh, Brother Jack, as you pass by,
  As you are now, so once was I.
  Just so game, and just so gay,
  But now, alack, they’ve stopped my pay. 
  No more I peep out of my blinkers,
  Here I be—­tucked in with clinkers!”

THE BELL-TOWER.

In the south of Europe, nigh a once frescoed capital, now with dank mould cankering its bloom, central in a plain, stands what, at distance, seems the black mossed stump of some immeasurable pine, fallen, in forgotten days, with Anak and the Titan.

As all along where the pine tree falls, its dissolution leaves a mossy mound—­last-flung shadow of the perished trunk; never lengthening, never lessening; unsubject to the fleet falsities of the sun; shade immutable, and true gauge which cometh by prostration—­so westward from what seems the stump, one steadfast spear of lichened ruin veins the plain.

From that tree-top, what birded chimes of silver throats had rung.  A stone pine; a metallic aviary in its crown:  the Bell-Tower, built by the great mechanician, the unblest foundling, Bannadonna.

Like Babel’s, its base was laid in a high hour of renovated earth, following the second deluge, when the waters of the Dark Ages had dried up, and once more the green appeared.  No wonder that, after so long and deep submersion, the jubilant expectation of the race should, as with Noah’s sons, soar into Shinar aspiration.

In firm resolve, no man in Europe at that period went beyond Bannadonna.  Enriched through commerce with the Levant, the state in which he lived voted to have the noblest Bell-Tower in Italy.  His repute assigned him to be architect.

Stone by stone, month by month, the tower rose.  Higher, higher; snail-like in pace, but torch or rocket in its pride.

After the masons would depart, the builder, standing alone upon its ever-ascending summit, at close of every day, saw that he overtopped still higher walls and trees.  He would tarry till a late hour there, wrapped in schemes of other and still loftier piles.  Those who of saints’ days thronged the spot—­hanging to the rude poles of scaffolding, like sailors on yards, or bees on boughs, unmindful of lime and dust, and falling chips of stone—­their homage not the less inspirited him to self-esteem.

At length the holiday of the Tower came.  To the sound of viols, the climax-stone slowly rose in air, and, amid the firing of ordnance, was laid by Bannadonna’s hands upon the final course.  Then mounting it, he stood erect, alone, with folded arms, gazing upon the white summits of blue inland Alps, and whiter crests of bluer Alps off-shore—­sights invisible from the plain.  Invisible, too, from thence was that eye he turned below, when, like the cannon booms, came up to him the people’s combustions of applause.