Tombstone Tuesday: Major Thomas Seward

This stone is another that can be found in Copps Hill Burying Ground in the North End of Boston, Mass. It reads:

Reader
Beneath this Stone is deposited
the Remains of
MAJOR THOMAS SEWARD
who gallantly fought
in our late revolutionary War
and through
its various scenes behaved
with Patriotic fortitude
& died in the calms
of domestic felicity as becomes
a Universal-Christian
Novr. 27th 1800 AEtat 60
The lovely turf where silence lays her head
The mound where pity sighs for hond. dead*
Such is the grief where sorrow now doth sigh
To learn to live is but to learn to die

Note the use of ‘f’ in place of ‘s’ in words like deposited and domestic. AEtat is of Latin derivation and means aged.

“Universal-Christian” is a term I haven’t seen before. A quick web search seemed to relate it to Methodism, but don’t quote me on that.

*I had to look up the words to complete this verse since I had trouble reading it at this point. I found the words here.

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