Sited on the west bank of the Seekonk River Swan Point is the final home to numerous notable new Englanders (odd alliteration here I know), including Union General Ambrose Burnside, a controversial military figure during the American Civil War, and H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), whose epitaph reads: "I am Providence." According to the cemetery guide, he wrote these words to a friend in 1927 upon a return from an unpleasant journey to New York City. (Lovecraft was a lifelong resident of Providence.) There was a phase in my life when I consumed Lovecraft's works with the same obsessive compulsion that also drove me to Leon Uris, Harold Robbins, Arthur Koestler and Joseph Conrad.
I also found my way over to the poignant figures of Sprague children, Mary (1850-1860) and William (1857-1860), brother and sister, resting together for eternity:
Farewell darlings we have laid you
Side by side beneath this sod,
Buds of earth all fadeless blooming
In the garden of our God.
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I was sad to have missed the annual Lovecraft reading at the Ladd Observatory in memory of his death. It used to be held at Swan Point when I first moved here, but I think they weren't fond of the gathering, so it moved.
The words on the Lovecraft plaque on the Brown campus (on Prospect St.) always remind me why I chose to stay in Providence.
"I never can be tied to raw new things,
For I first saw the light in an old town,
Where from my window huddled roofs sloped down
To a quaint harbor rich with visionings.
Streets with carved doorways where the sunset beams
Flooded old fanlights and small window-panes
And Georgian steeples topped with gilded vanes.
These are the sights that shaped my childhood dreams."
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