Success Quote by Donald G. Mitchell

Mitchell is weaponizing the cemetery as a democratic reset button. The voice begins with a mild scold - "I care not how worldly you may be" - and then steadily strips the reader of their usual armor: taste, rank, hustle, cosmopolitan confidence. "Worldly" here isn’t a compliment; it’s a diagnosis of someone trained to take status cues seriously. His pivot is blunt: there are moments when those cues collapse into "dust". The word does double duty, echoing both social triviality and literal burial matter, making vanity not merely foolish but physically reducible.

The shrewdest move is "at the graves of the great". He doesn’t point you to anonymous headstones; he sends you to monuments, the kind meant to preserve hierarchy even in death. Yet even that grandeur can’t hold. Standing before celebrated lives, the visitor "dream[s] of a coming country" - a hazy afterlife, but also a moral republic beyond class where achievement no longer buys exemption. It’s a national metaphor turned inside out: the American fantasy of upward ascent replaced by a leveling destination.

The kicker is the emotional reversal: your "proudest hopes" are not fulfilled but "dimmed forever". Mitchell is not selling comforting heaven; he’s describing a chastening clarity. In the mid-19th century, that mix of piety and realism fit a culture steeped in sentimental mourning and public memorialization. The subtext is an argument against the era’s confidence in legacy: history may remember you, but the universe won’t flatter you.