"Old-fashioned attitudes toward death and burial were conditioned by crowded old-world graveyards in London, where, as one writer put it, corpses are 'buried in standing postures because not room is left to lay them down.' In many such graveyards, the dead were periodically removed to make more room, and in other cases, whole cemeteries were leveled as building sites. The American cemetery seemed by contrast 'a special kind of park with a peculiar dignity and sacredness,' which offered visible signs of grace and immortality with the changing seasons. Romantic melancholy inspired the first 'rural' cemeteries...."
-- Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America, Peter J. Schmitt, 1969, p. 67.
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