ARLINGTON, Va.-- After all the tributes, after all the film clips, after all the reminiscences, after all the eulogies, there was simply this: A coffin. A crescent of mourners. A president's solemn remarks. A son's kiss and his touch -- a loving pat, really -- at the gravestone of his father. And silence.

All America, it seemed, was silent yesterday afternoon. And the silence was deepest here, on a Virginia hillside, where Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis was buried beside her husband, a martyred president of the United States, and two of their children.

In that silence, a kaleidoscope of images from President Kennedy's burial raced by: A caisson, drawn on its funeral route by three pairs of matched gray horses, the right row saddled but riderless. A widow, the black veil shielding but not hiding her grief. A scrawl on White House letterhead in the first lady's own hand, intended to be instructions for the memorial program of her husband: ''Dear God, please take care of your servant.''

And yet it was no struggle -- here in the hot sun or in millions of homes, factories, farms and offices scattered around the country -- to linger not on the funeral and burial of three decades ago but on the one that was happening that very afternoon.

The commentators all said this was the final tattoo of Camelot, and there was, to be sure, something of that. But this afternoon wasn't about the man she married, but the woman she was.

Born to privilege, she was buried in quiet understatement in the Virginia soil on which she had ridden and which she loved. It was, of course, at the site of the eternal flame, placed there at her request -- one of the few things she asked of the country after her president was killed -- and assembled by the Washington Gas & Light Co., which hastily put together the tanks and copper tubing that November weekend so long ago.

More than a few have thought this one of the loveliest spots in the nation. It is a place where, almost by miracle, the Jefferson Memorial, the Washington Monument and Capitol Dome all are visible, even in yesterday's haze. The setting inevitably triggers allusions to John Winthrop, the Puritan leader who vowed from the deck of the Arbella off the Massachusetts coast in 1630 that the new land would be a ''City Upon a Hill.'' The phrase, borrowed from the book of Matthew, was cited by John Kennedy himself on Beacon Hill just before he departed for Washington and his inauguration.

Jacqueline Kennedy visited this spot shortly before the funeral of her husband; her sister-in-law, Jean Smith, had told her it was ''the most wonderful place,'' and, in a scene that William Manchester likened to ''the opening of the final act of 'Our Town,' '' she stood there, silent, for a quarter hour. Then she nodded and the choice was made.

Yesterday the heads were bowed again, this time for her.

It was simpler than in 1963, and the handful of press observers gathered on the hill to record the moment felt less like witnesses, more like intruders. For John Kennedy's funeral, Mrs. Kennedy arranged for the skirling of the Black Watch bagpipers and saw to it that Irish cadets from the Military College at Curragh, County Kildare, were there, marching at a hundred paces a minute [counted in Gaelic], their rifle butts reversed, a symbol of mourning for the martyrs of Ireland.

This time there were only the Navy Sea Chanters.

Three decades ago John F. Kennedy Jr., at his mother's urging, saluted his father. He had seen the big men, the soldiers, execute a salute, and he did it himself, crisply and unforgettably. Earlier in the day, his third birthday, he had received a toy helicopter and a copy of ''Peter Rabbit.''

This time, a man himself, he kissed his mother's coffin, tapped his father's gravestone, and paid his respects to his brother, Patrick, who died shortly after birth. It was a completely spontaneous moment, overwhelming in its power.

Hours earlier, his uncle, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who has spoken at these events all too often, noted that Mrs. Onassis never wanted public notice, in part because it brought back ''painful memories of unbearable sorrow,'' all in the glare of a million lights.

And so the proceedings here at America's most famous military cemetery -- with row upon row of markers, tributes to our military dead -- were extraordinarily controlled. The Army Military District even distributed a statement to news organizations: ''Those who try to penetrate the grave site area will be escorted out by law-enforcement officials.''

The 11-minute graveside service had the boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, and symbols of all the beauty and wealth that Thomas Gray cited in his famous Elegy. There was, for the living, the sobering reminder that, as Gray put it, the ''paths of glory lead but to the grave.''

At the grave of Jacqueline Onassis the mind returns to a picture, laid across two pages of the special memorial edition of Life magazine, tucked away in thousands of closets, retrieved from many of them in the last few days. The headline from 1963 reads: ''The warmest way to remember him.''

The background is the dunes of Hyannis Port and, beyond it, a sandy pathway to the sea. In the foreground is a little child, Caroline, feeding an animal cracker to her dad. And there, on the right, is a woman, sitting amid the dandelions, laughing at the scene, content, thoroughly at ease. She was a lovely lady.