This gravestone, commemorating John Safford who died in 1782, stands in the old burying ground off the town common in Harvard, Massachusetts. The poetry at the bottom is two verses from Isaac Watts’s metrical version of Psalm 39:3, part three. As rendered by the gravestone carver, it reads as follows:
Crush’d as a moth beneath thy hands
We moulder to the dust;
Our feeble pou’rs can ne’er withstand
And all our beuty’s lost.
This mortal life decays apace
How soon the bubble’s broke
Adam and all his numerous Race
Are vanity and smoke.