The Andes and the Amazon; Or, Across the Continent of South America

CHAPTER XXIV.

IN MEMORIAM.

"A life that all the Muses decked
      With gifts of grace that might express
  All comprehensive tenderness,
All-subtilizing intellect."—Tennyson.

On the east of the city of Quito is a beautiful and extensive plain, so level that it is literally a table-land. It is the classic ground of the astronomy of the eighteenth century: here the French and Spanish academicians made their celebrated measurement of a meridian of the earth. As you stand on the edge of this plain just without the city, you see the dazzling summit of Cayambi looking down from the north; on your left are the picturesque defiles of Pichincha; on your right the slopes of Antisana. Close by you, standing between the city and the plain, is a high white wall inclosing a little plot, like the city above, "four square." You are reminded by its shape, and also by its position relative to Quito and Pichincha, of that other sacred inclosure just outside the walls of Jerusalem and at the foot of Olivet, the Garden of Gethsemane. This is the Protestant Cemetery.

P. Staunton

Through the efforts of our late representative—now also numbered with the dead—this place was assigned by the government for the interment of foreigners who do not die in the Romish faith. And there we buried our fellow-traveler, Colonel Phineas Staunton, the artist of the expedition, and Vice-Chancellor of Ingham University, New York. On the 8th of September, 1867, we bore him through the streets of Quito to this quiet resting-place, without parade and in solemn silence—just as we believe his unobtrusive spirit would have desired, and just as his Savior was carried from the cross to the sepulchre. No splendid hearse or nodding plumes; no long procession, save the unheard tread of the angels; no requiem, save the unheard harps of the seraphs. We gave him a Protestant Christian burial, such as Quito never saw. In this corner of nature's vast cathedral, the secluded shrine of grandeur and beauty not found in Westminster Abbey, we left him. We parted with him on the mount which is to be the scene of his transfiguration.

It would be difficult for an artist to find a grave whose surroundings are so akin to his feelings. He lies in the lofty lap of the Andes, and snow-white pinnacles stand around him on every side, just as we imagine the mountains are around the city of God. We think we hear him saying, as Fanny Kemble Butler said of another burial-ground: "I will not rise to trouble any one if they will let me sleep here. I will only ask to be permitted, once in a while, to raise my head and look out upon this glorious scene." No dark and dismal fogs gather at evening about that spot. It lies nearer to heaven than any other Protestant cemetery in the world. "It is good (says Beecher) to have our mortal remains go upward for their burial, and catch the earliest sounds of that trumpet which shall raise the dead." And the day is coming when that precious vein of gold that now lies in the bosom of the mighty Andes shall leave its rocky bed and shine in seven-fold purity. Indeed, the artist is already in that higher studio among the mountains of Beulah.

A simple sculptured obelisk of sorrow stands over the dust of Colonel Staunton: his most fitting monument is his own life-work. He was the very painter Humboldt longed for in his writings—"the artist, who, studying in nature's great hot-house bounded by the tropics, should add a new and more magnificent kingdom of nature to art." Colonel Staunton, true and lovely in his own character, was ever seeking in nature for whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are pure, and now was about to add whatsoever things are grand. He was a Christian artist, in sympathy with such men as Raphael and Leonardo de Vinci. "The habitual choice of sacred subjects (says Ruskin) implies that the painter has a natural disposition to dwell on the highest thoughts of which humanity is capable." No shallow or false person could have conceived his Ascension. Only the highest qualities of the intellect and heart—a soul already half ascended—could have given such ethereal lightness to those "two men in white apparel." Only the pure in heart see God. As we revisit in imagination the spot where he sleeps so well, we behold, in the calm sublimity of the mountains that surround his grave, an image of the undisturbed repose of his spirit on the Rock of Ages.

APPENDICES.

Barometrical Measurements across South America.[188]

APPENDIX B.

CAMPAS WORDS.

(My informant on numerals, a boy, though quite intelligent, could go no farther; but the tribe undoubtedly count ten.)

APPENDIX C.

COMMERCE OF THE AMAZON.

View the continuation of the table by scrolling or click here for an expanded version.

I.—Value of Products Exported from different Towns on the Amazon by the Imperial Steamers in 1867.[190]