The Melvin Memorial

On a recent visit to the Metropolitan Museum, I spent some time with the figure of Mourning Victory, reproduced in marble from the Melvin Memorial that stands in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.

This is one of my favorite works of art. It is even more impressive where I first saw it, on a shadowy hillside in the cemetery, not far from Poets’ Ridge where Thoreau and Emerson are buried (Emerson under an impressive boulder, Thoreau beside a small white headstone marked Henry, where bunches of goldenrod are sometimes left). The gloom of the site emphasizes the power and melancholy of the flag-wrapped figure emerging from the stone.

It didn’t occur to me until recently, though, that the three Melvin brothers whose death in the Civil War are remembered with this monument (Asa, John, and Samuel) must have been related to George Melvin, the local man noted by Thoreau as a dedicated hunter and for having a discovered a rare pink azalea (May 31, 1853).

He was sitting in the shade, bareheaded, at his back door. He had a large pailful of the azalea recently plucked and in the shade behind his house, which he said he was going to carry to town at evening. He had also a sprig set out. He had been out all the forenoon and said he had got seven pickerel,—perhaps ten. Apparently he had been drinking and was just getting over it. At first he was a little shy about telling me where the azalea grew, but I saw that I should soon get it out of him.