Photo of the Day: Grave of Louisa May Alcott, Concord, MA

This week in 1888, Little Women author Louisa May Alcott—weakened from years of unceasing labor on behalf of others, then utterly exhausted from her bedside vigil next to her father, who had died only two days before—passed away herself, at age 55, in Boston. 

But she was buried outside the city, in the town where she came to maturity and fulfilled her literary ambitions: Concord, Mass. Like fellow Concord residents Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne, she lies in a larger family plot, with her individuality marked by this stone with fading initials and dates, along with a more emphatic stone with her name—“Louisa M. Alcott”—expressed more fully close by.

The photo accompanying this post, which I took on a visit to the area 10 years ago, shows her gravesite in the largest of Concord’s three cemeteries, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. While the entire property extends nearly 100 acres, only one-third of it is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. 

Not coincidentally, this portion includes as concentrated a group of major American literary figures as you can expect to find across the country. For the loads of tourists who pass through, these authors are conveniently clustered together on Author’s Ridge. You can bet that, in this 150th year after the publication of Little Women, more than a few visitors will be paying tribute to the creator of the March sisters.

The need to avoid highway traffic beckoned me, but can you blame me for wanting to make a trip to this cemetery the last stop on my week-long visit to the Concord-Lexington-Boston area? Where else could I achieve, all at once, some sense of the kindred nonconformist spirits that abided in town with Alcott:

* Ralph Waldo Emerson, 

*Henry David Thoreau, 

*Nathaniel Hawthorne, and 

*William Ellery Channing. 

It seemed so quiet on that mid-autumn Saturday morning, with the sunlight filtering through the trees of this early example of the “rural cemetery” trend that took hold in antebellum America. But only now has it struck me that, perhaps for the first time in her life, Alcott could only come to rest at her death.

She and her sisters (immortalized, in fictionalized form, in Little Women) lived a childhood of genteel poverty occasioned by their father Bronson Alcott, an educator of invincible optimism and utopianism who could never provide enough for his own family. In adulthood, Louisa felt compelled to assist her beleaguered mother in meeting the family’s needs, so she cranked out one novel after another. 

(Though her heart might have been in Little Women, much of her early output consisted of thrillers—the kind of “sensation” fiction popularized around that time by Willkie Collins in England.) 

Louisa’s life may be the best example possible of her own observation in The Abbot's Ghost: A Christmas Story:

“Human minds are more full of mysteries than any written book and more changeable than the cloud shapes in the air.”

Quote of the Day (Thomas Hardy, on a Snowy Cemetery)

“The tripletime beat

Bounds forth on the snow,

But the spry springing feet

Of a century ago,

And the arms that enlaced

As the couples embraced,

Are silent old bones

Under graying gravestones.”—English poet-novelist Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), from “Music in a Snowy Street,” in Hardy: Poems (Everyman’s Library, Pocket Poets Series, 1985)

Photo of the Day: Ralph Waldo Emerson Grave, Concord, MA

Transcendentalist essayist/poet Ralph Waldo Emerson died on this date at age 78 in 1882. “The Sage of Concord” was buried in his town’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, in a section known, appropriately enough, as “Authors' Ridge.” Also here: Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and perhaps the closest to Emerson in sensibility, Henry David Thoreau. Can you think of a town of comparable size that has produced so many literati? I can’t.

Nine years ago, in the fall, I was visiting the Boston, area, staying in Lexington and Concord, when I took this photo. I could not bid goodbye to this area that had done so much to establish America’s political and literary without stopping at this site. So, on a sunny, beneficent Saturday morning, I came here.

It is entirely appropriate that Emerson was laid to rest in this spot.  He had, after all, delivered the speech at the dedication of the cemetery in 1855. It is equally appropriate that he and his family occupies the most visible family plot in this stretch of ground, as he had done so much in the antebellum period to make Concord a center of intellectual life in the United States.

The remains of three people closest to Emerson are next to him: his second wife Lidian, daughter Ellen, and most poignantly, son Waldo. The latter’s death, at age five, plunged his father into a torrent of grief, leading ultimately to the hard-won wisdom expressed in one of his greatest essays, “Experience” (1844).

The verses that appear on the bronze plaque on Ralph’s uncarved boulder that you see here—“The passive master lent his hand/To the vast soul that o’er him planned”—come from Emerson’s poem “The Problem,” which disclaims interest in ministries (“Yet not for all his faith can see/Would I that cowled churchman be”). He had shocked the sensibilities of many New Englanders when he not only gave up his Unitarian ministry in his late 20s, but went on to stress the human rather than divine nature of Jesus. The rest of his hugely influential career was spent in creating a new kind of American spirituality that extolled the “divine sufficiency of the individual."

Photo of the Day: Metropolis of the Dead: Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn

A friend’s recent photos of a recent trip to Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery prompted me to go back to my own vast cache of pictures taken in this National Historic Landmark over a year and a half ago. While my images are not as lovely as my friend’s, they do record the great variety in this place.

Even so, what I photographed conveys only a fraction of this 478-acre pastoral setting. The than 560,000 “permanent residents” here would make this a good-sized city in its own right, and a necropolis of enormous size. 

I was only able to get to a mere handful of the more famous "residents" in the two hours I spent at the site. This photograph illustrates the only real way to see more of that, if you don’t have a car (as I did not when I went there): Take the Wednesday bus tour. But be sure to sign up in advance. I checked the cemetery's Website the other night, and that trolley tour was already full.

Photo of the Day: Sylvan Waters, Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn

Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn was, justifiably, considered a sensation when it  was founded in 1838, epitomizing a new style in pastoral landscapes for the final resting places of Americans. One of the sights on its 478 acres was Sylvan Waters, captured in this image that I took when I visited this National Historic Landmark last October.