'A kiss from the tomb'

-- Photo by Swampyank

The Egyptian Revival entrance to New England most famous cemetery, Mount Auburn Cemetery, which straddles the Cambridge-Watertown line just outside of Boston. Dedicated in 1831, Mount Auburn is the first so-called "rural cemetery'' in America and is the resting place of many prominent Bostonians. It's a National Historic Landmark and a wonderful place for a stroll, with glorious landscaping, trees and shrubs -- many of them flowering -- on its 174 rolling acres.

The  development of Mount Auburn coincided  with the rising popularity of the term "cemetery," derived from the Greek for "a sleeping place," instead of  the darker view of death and the afterlife expressed in older New England graveyards and church burial plots.

There's an erroneous old story that Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy's monument (below) at Mount Auburn has a phone.

"I did not obstruct the state, nor religion,

But I saw through both and maintained my independence.

I kept my counsels among the learned.

My learning was more private and precious than worldly.

The world had no sense of the devious,

So my private vicissitudes were mine alone.

I say all this with a special sort of grace

For I avoided many of the pitfalls of fallen man

And while I did not have heroic size, the

Creative grandeur, or mastership of the mind

I earned my bread by cynicism alone,

And blow you all a kiss from the tomb.''

-- From "A New England bachelor,'' by Richard Eberhardt