OUR GREAT TRUST.
GEORGE STILLMAN HILLARD, an eminent American writer, lawyer, and orator. Born at Machias, Maine, 1808; died, 1879. From an Independence Day oration.
Our Rome can not fall, and we be innocent. No conqueror will chain us to the car of his triumph; no countless swarm of Huns and Goths will bury the memorials and trophies of civilized life beneath a living tide of barbarism. Our own selfishness, our own neglect, our own pa.s.sions, and our own vices will furnish the elements of our destruction. With our own hands we shall tear down the stately edifice of our glory. We shall die by self-inflicted wounds.
But we will not talk of themes like these. We will not think of failure, dishonor, and despair. We will elevate our minds to the contemplation of our high duties and the great trust committed to us. We will resolve to lay the foundations of our prosperity on that rock of private virtue which can not be shaken until the laws of the moral world are reversed.
From our own b.r.e.a.s.t.s shall flow the salient springs of national increase. Then our success, our happiness, our glory, will be as inevitable as the inferences of mathematics. We may calmly smile at all the croakings of all the ravens, whether of native or foreign breed.
The whole will not grow weak by the increase of its parts. Our growth will be like that of the mountain oak, which strikes its roots more deeply into the soil, and clings to it with a closer grasp, as its lofty head is exalted and its broad arms stretched out. The loud burst of joy and grat.i.tude which, on this, the anniversary of our independence, is breaking from the full hearts of a mighty people, will never cease to be heard. No chasms of sullen silence will interrupt its course; no discordant notes of sectional madness mar the general harmony. Year after year will increase it by tributes from now unpeopled solitudes.
The farthest West shall hear it and rejoice; the Oregon shall swell it with the voice of its waters; the Rocky Mountains shall fling back the glad sound from their snowy crests.
ON FREEDOM"S GENEROUS SOIL.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, M. D., the distinguished American author, wit, and poet. Born in Cambridge, Ma.s.s., August 29, 1809.
America is the only place where man is full-grown.
NATIONAL HERITAGE.
The Rev. THOMAS STARR KING, an American Unitarian divine. Born in New York in 1824; died, 1864. From an address on the "Privileges and Duties of Patriotism," delivered in November, 1862. By permission of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Publishers, Boston.
Suppose that the continent could turn toward you to-morrow at sunrise, and show to you the whole American area in the short hours of the sun"s advance from Eastport to the Pacific. You would see New England roll into light from the green plumes of Aroostook to the silver stripe of the Hudson; westward thence over the Empire State, and over the lakes, and over the sweet valleys of Pennsylvania, and over the prairies, the morning blush would run and would waken all the line of the Mississippi; from the frosts where it rises to the fervid waters in which it pours, for 3,000 miles it would be visible, fed by rivers that flow from every mile of the Alleghany slope, and edged by the green embroideries of the temperate and tropic zones; beyond this line another basin, too--the Missouri--catching the morning, leads your eye along its western slope till the Rocky Mountains burst upon the vision, and yet do not bar it; across its pa.s.ses we must follow, as the stubborn courage of American pioneers has forced its way, till again the Sierras and their silver veins are tinted along the mighty bulwark with the break of day; and then over to the gold fields of the western slope, and the fatness of the California soil, and the beautiful valleys of Oregon, and the stately forests of Washington, the eye is drawn, as the globe turns out of the night shadow; and when the Pacific waves are crested with radiance, you have the one blending picture--nay, the reality--of the American domain. No such soil--so varied by climate, by products, by mineral riches, by forest and lake, by wild heights and b.u.t.tresses, and by opulent plains, yet all bound into unity of configuration and bordered by both warm and icy seas--no such domain, was ever given to one people.
And then suppose that you could see in a picture as vast and vivid the preparation for our inheritance of this land. Columbus, haunted by his round idea, and setting sail in a sloop, to see Europe sink behind him, while he was serene in the faith of his dream; the later navigators of every prominent Christian race who explored the upper coasts; the Mayflower, with her cargo of sifted acorns from the hardy stock of British puritanism, and the ship, whose name we know not, that bore to Virginia the ancestors of Washington; the clearing of the wilderness, and the dotting of its clearings with the proofs of manly wisdom and Christian trust; then the gradual interblending of effort and interest and sympathy into one life--the congress of the whole Atlantic slope--to resist oppression upon one member; the rally of every State around Washington and his holy sword, and again the n.o.bler rally around him when he signed the Const.i.tution, and after that the organization of the farthest West with North and South, into one polity and communion; when this was finished, the tremendous energy of free life, under the stimulus and with the aid of advancing science, in increasing wealth, subduing the wilds to the bonds of use, multiplying fertile fields and busy schools and n.o.ble work-shops and churches, hallowed by free-will offerings of prayer; and happy homes, and domes dedicated to the laws of States that rise by magic from the haunts of the buffalo and deer, all in less than a long lifetime; and if we could see also how, in achieving this, the flag which represents all this history is dyed in traditions of exploits, by land and sea, that have given heroes to American annals whose names are potent to conjure with, while the world"s list of thinkers in matter is crowded with the names of American inventors, and the higher rolls of literary merit are not empty of the t.i.tle of our "representative men"; if all that the past has done for us, and the present reveals, could thus stand apparent in one picture, and then if the promise of the future to the children of our millions under our common law, and with continental peace, could be caught in one vast spectral exhibition--the wealth in store, the power, the privilege, the freedom, the learning, the expansive and varied and mighty unity in fellowship, almost fulfilling the poet"s dream of "the parliament of man, the federation of the world"--you would exclaim with exultation, "I, too, am an American!" You would feel that patriotism, next to your tie to the Divine Love, is the greatest privilege of your life; and you would devote yourselves, out of inspiration and joy, to the obligations of patriotism, that this land, so spread, so adorned, so colonized, so blessed, should be kept forever against all the a.s.saults of traitors, one in polity, in spirit, and in aim.
SIFTED WHEAT.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. From his "Courtship of Miles Standish,"
IV.
G.o.d hath sifted three kingdoms to find the wheat for this planting.
CENTER OF CIVILIZATION.
From _North British Review_.
It is too late to disparage America. Accustomed to look with wonder on the civilization of the past, upon the unblest glories of Greece and of Rome, upon mighty empires that have risen but to fall, the English mind has never fixed itself on the grand phenomenon of a great nation at school. Viewing America as a forward child that has deserted its home and abjured its parent, we have ever looked upon her with a callous heart and with an evil eye, judicially blind to her progress.
But how she has gone on developing the resources of a region teeming with vegetable life. How she has intrenched herself amid n.o.ble inst.i.tutions, with temples enshrined in religious toleration, with universities of private bequest and public organization, with national and unshackled schools, and with all the improvements which science, literature, and philanthropy demand from the citizen or from the state.
Supplied from the Old World with its superabundant life, the Anglo-Saxon tide has been carrying its multiplied population to the West, rushing onward through impervious forests, leveling their lofty pines and converting the wilderness into abodes of populous plenty, intelligence, and taste. Nor is this living flood the destroying scourge which Providence sometimes lets loose upon our species. It breathes in accents which are our own; it is instinct with English life; and it bears on its snowy crest the auroral light of the East, to gild the darkness of the West with the purple radiance of salvation, of knowledge, and of peace.
Her empire of coal, her kingdom of cotton and of corn, her regions of gold and of iron, mark out America as the center of civilization, as the emporium of the world"s commerce, as the granary and storehouse out of which the kingdoms of the East will be clothed and fed; and, we greatly fear, as the asylum in which our children will take refuge when the hordes of Asia and the semi-barbarians of Eastern Europe shall again darken and desolate the West.
Though dauntless in her mien, and colossal in her strength, she displays upon her banner the star of peace, shedding its radiance upon us. Let us reciprocate the celestial light, and, strong and peaceful ourselves, we shall have nothing to fear from her power, but everything to learn from her example.
A YOUTHFUL LAND.
JAMES OTIS, a celebrated American orator and patriot. Born at West Barnstable, Ma.s.s., February 5, 1725. Killed by lightning at Andover, Ma.s.s., May, 1783.
England may as well dam up the waters of the Nile with bulrushes as to fetter the step of Freedom, more proud and firm in this youthful land than where she treads the sequestered glens of Scotland or couches herself among the magnificent mountains of Switzerland. We plunged into the wave with the great charter of freedom in our teeth because the f.a.ggot and torch were behind us. We have waked this new world from its savage lethargy; forests have been prostrated in our path, towns and cities have grown up suddenly as the flowers of the tropics, and the fires in our autumnal woods are scarcely more rapid than the increase of our wealth and population.
THE COLUMBIAN CHORUS.
Prof. John Knowles Paine of Harvard University has completed the music of his Columbian march and chorus, to be performed on the occasion of the dedication of the Exposition buildings, October 21, 1892, to write which he was especially commissioned by the Exposition management. Prof.
Paine has provided these original words for the choral ending of his composition:
All hail and welcome, nations of the earth!
Columbia"s greeting comes from every State.
Proclaim to all mankind the world"s new birth Of freedom, age on age shall consecrate.
Let war and enmity forever cease, Let glorious art and commerce banish wrong; The universal brotherhood of peace Shall be Columbia"s high inspiring song.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE LANDING OF COLUMBUS. From the celebrated picture by John Vanderlyn, in the Rotunda of the Capitol at Washington, D. C. (See page 310.)]
SOVEREIGN OF THE ASCENDANT.
CHARLES PHILLIPS, an Irish barrister. Born at Sligo, about 1788. He practiced with success in criminal cases in London, and gained a wide reputation by his speeches, the style of which is rather florid. He was for many years a commissioner of the insolvent debtors" court in London. Died in 1859.
Search creation round, where can you find a country that presents so sublime a view, so interesting an antic.i.p.ation? Who shall say for what purpose mysterious Providence may not have designed her? Who shall say that when in its follies, or its crimes, the Old World may have buried all the pride of its power, and all the pomp of its civilization, human nature may not find its destined renovation in the New! When its temples and its trophies shall have moldered into dust; when the glories of its name shall be but the legend of tradition, and the light of its achievements live only in song, philosophy will revive again in the sky of her Franklin, and glory rekindle at the urn of her Washington.
Is this the vision of romantic fancy? Is it even improbable? I appeal to History! Tell me, thou reverend chronicler of the grave, can all the illusions of ambition realized, can all the wealth of a universal commerce, can all the achievements of successful heroism, or all the establishments of this world"s wisdom secure to empire the permanency of its possessions? Alas, Troy thought so once; yet the land of Priam lives only in song. Thebes thought so once; yet her hundred gates have crumbled, and her very tombs are but as the dust they were vainly intended to commemorate. So thought Palmyra; where is she? So thought the countries of Demosthenes and the Spartan; yet Leonidas is trampled by the timid slave, and Athens insulted by the servile, mindless, and enervate Ottoman. In his hurried march, Time has but looked at their imagined immortality, and all its vanities, from the palace to the tomb, have, with their ruins, erased the very impression of his footsteps.
The days of their glory are as if they had never been; and the island that was then a speck, rude and neglected, in the barren ocean, now rivals the ubiquity of their commerce, the glory of their arms, the fame of their philosophy, the eloquence of their senate, and the inspiration of their bards. Who shall say, then, contemplating the past, that England, proud and potent as she appears, may not one day be what Athens is, and the young America yet soar to be what Athens was. Who shall say, when the European column shall have moldered, and the night of barbarism obscured its very ruins, that that mighty continent may not emerge from the horizon, to rule, for its time, sovereign of the ascendant.
LAND OF LIBERTY.
WENDELL PHILLIPS, "the silver-tongued orator of America," and anti-slavery reformer. Born in Boston, Ma.s.s., November 29, 1811; died, February 2, 1884.
The Carpathian Mountains may shelter tyrants. The slopes of Germany may bear up a race more familiar with the Greek text than the Greek phalanx.
For aught I know, the wave of Russian rule may sweep so far westward as to fill once more with miniature despots the robber castles of the Rhine. But of this I am sure: G.o.d piled the Rocky Mountains as the ramparts of freedom. He scooped the Valley of the Mississippi as the cradle of free States. He poured Niagara as the anthem of free men.
THE SHIP COLUMBIA.
EDWARD G. PORTER. In an article ent.i.tled "The Ship Columbia and the Discovery of Oregon," in the _New England Magazine_, June, 1892.
Few ships, if any, in our merchant marine, since the organization of the republic, have acquired such distinction as the Columbia.
By two noteworthy achievements, 100 years ago, she attracted the attention of the commercial world and rendered a service to the United States unparalleled in our history. _She was the first American vessel to carry the stars and stripes around the globe; and, by her discovery of "the great river of the West" to which her name was given, she furnished us with the t.i.tle to our possession_ of that magnificent domain which to-day is represented by the flourishing young States of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.