Best spot for sentimental transcendental reflection

Judging by the popularity of a Web site named findagrave.com, celebrity cemetery hopping is a rampant underground pastime. Apparently, the traditional pilgrimage to pay one's respects has been replaced with a collect-the-whole-set-driven stop-and-gawk caprice. Keep these morbid tourists away from Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord. There, tucked away in overgrown obscurity on a hilltop that must have dominated the landscape when Ralph Waldo Emerson dedicated Concord's "new" burying ground in 1855, lie buried Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Emerson, and the Alcott sisters. Emerson rests beneath a weighty monument befitting his self-styled philosopher-king status, but the others are memorialized with Yankee parsimony -- modest stones that devotees decorate with mementos, not bouquets. This is Authors' Ridge, a humble shrine to homegrown original thinkers and iconoclasts, a private place where the peace and melancholy overwhelm you with renewed appreciation for people who lived well and thought well. Visit alone; you'll linger.

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Route 62, Concord. Occasional signs direct you to Authors' Ridge.