Blithedale Pasture

Blithedale, thus far in its progress, had never found the necessity of
a burial-ground. There was some consultation among us in what spot
Zenobia might most fitly be laid. It was my own wish that she should
sleep at the base of Eliot's pulpit, and that on the rugged front of
the rock the name by which we familiarly knew her, Zenobia,--and not
another word, should be deeply cut, and left for the moss and lichens
to fill up at their long leisure. But Hollingsworth (to whose ideas on
this point great deference was due) made it his request that her grave
might be dug on the gently sloping hillside, in the wide pasture,
where, as we once supposed, Zenobia and he had planned to build their
cottage. And thus it was done, accordingly.

She was buried very much as other people have been for hundreds of
years gone by. In anticipation of a death, we Blithedale colonists had
sometimes set our fancies at work to arrange a funereal ceremony, which
should be the proper symbolic expression of our spiritual faith and
eternal hopes; and this we meant to substitute for those customary
rites which were moulded originally out of the Gothic gloom, and by
long use, like an old velvet pall, have so much more than their first
death-smell in them. But when the occasion came we found it the
simplest and truest thing, after all, to content ourselves with the old
fashion, taking away what we could, but interpolating no novelties, and
particularly avoiding all frippery of flowers and cheerful emblems.