Imagens das páginas
PDF
ePub

patriotism may turn its eye hitherward, and be assured that the foundations of our national power will still stand strong. We wish that this column, rising towards heaven among the pointed spires of so many temples dedicated to God, may contribute also to produce in all minds a pious feeling of dependence and gratitude. We wish, finally, that the last object on the sight of him who leaves his native shore, and the first to gladden him who revisits it, may be something which shall remind him of the liberty and the glory of his country. Let it rise till it meet the sun in his coming. Let the earliest light of the morning gild it, and parting day linger and play on its summit.

THE SURVIVORS OF BUNKER HILL.

VENERABLE MEN! you have come down to us from a former generation. Heaven has bounteously lengthened out your lives that you might behold this joyous day. You are now where you stood fifty years ago this very hour, with your brothers and your neighbors, shoulder to shoulder, in the strife for your country. Behold how altered! The same heavens are indeed over your heads; the same oceans rolls at your feet; but all else, how changed! You hear now no roar of hostile cannon, you see no mixed volumes of smoke and flame rising from burning Charlestown. The ground strewed with the dead and the dying; the impetuous charge, the steady and suc. cessful repulse; the loud call to repeated assault; the summoning of all that is manly to repeated resistance; a thousand bosoms freely and fearlessly bared in an instant to whatever of terror there may be in war and death; all these you have witnessed, but you witness

them no more. All is peace. The heights of yonder metropolis, its towers and roofs, which you then saw filled with wives, and children, and countrymen, in dis tress and terror, and looking with unutterable emotions for the issue of the combat, have presented you to-day with the sight of its whole happy population come out to welcome and greet you with an universal jubilee. Yonder proud ships, by a felicity of position, appropri ately lying at the foot of this mount, and seeming fondly to cling around it, are not means of annoyance to you, but your country's own means of distinction and defence. All is peace; and God has granted you this sight of your country's happiness ere you slumber in the grave for ever. He has allowed you to behold and partake the reward of your patriotic toil; and he has allowed us, your sons and countrymen, to meet you here, and in the name of the present generation-in the name of your country-in the name of liberty-to thank you.

But

But, alas! you are not all here. Time and the sword have thinned your ranks. Prescott, Putnam, Stark, Brooks, Read, Pomeroy, Bridge! our eyes seek for you in vain amidst this broken band. You are gathered to your fathers, and live only to your country in her grateful remembrance and your own bright example. let us not too much grieve that you have met with the common fate of men. You lived at least long enough to know that your work had been nobly and successfully accomplished. You lived to see your country's indepen. dence established, and to sheathe your swords from war. On the light of liberty you saw arise the light of peace,

like

"another morn

Risen on mid-noon;

and the sky on which you closed your eyes, was cloudless.

GENERAL WARREN.

But ah! Him! the first great martyr in this great cause! Him! the premature victim of his own self-devoting heart. Him! the head of our civil councils and the destined leader of our military bands, whom nothing brought hither but the unquenchable fire of his own spirit; Him! cut off by Providence in the hour of overwhelming anxiety and thick gloom; falling ere he saw the star of his country rise; pouring out his generous blood like water before he knew whether it would ferti. lize a land of freedom or of bondage! How shall I struggle with the emotions that stifle the utterance of thy name! Our poor work may perish, but thine shall endure! This monument may moulder away; the solid ground it rests on may sink down to a level with the sea; but thy memory shall not fail! Wheresoever among men a heart shall be found that beats to the transports of patriotism and liberty, its aspirations shall be to claim kindred with thy spirit!

THE FEELING OF THE PILGRIMS.

"If God prosper us," might have been the appropri ate language of our fathers when they landed on the rock; if God prosper us, we shall here begin a work which shall last for ages, we shall plant here a new so. ciety, in the principles of the fullest liberty, and the purest religion; we shall subdue this wilderness which is

before us; we shall fill this region of the great continent, which stretches from pole to pole, with civilization and Christianity; the temples of the true God shall rise where now ascends the smoke of idolatrous sacrifice; fields and gardens, the flowers of summer, and the waving and golden harvest of autumn, shall extend over a thousand hills, and stretch along a thousand valleys, never, since the creation, reclaimed to the use of civilized man. We shall whiten this coast with the canvass of a prosperous commerce; we shall stud the long and winding shore with a hundred cities. That which we sow in weak. ness shall be raised in strength. From our sincere but houseless worship, there shall spring splendid temples to record God's goodness; from the simplicity of our social union, there shall arise wise and politic constitutions of government, full of the liberty which we ourselves bring and breathe; from our zeal for learning, institutions shall spring up, which shall scatter the light of knowledge throughout the land; and in time, paying back where they have borrowed, shall contribute their part to the great aggregate of human knowledge; and our descendants through all generations shall look back to this spot and to this hour with unabated affection and regard.

LOVE OF RELIGIOUS LIBERTY.

They sought to enjoy a higher degree of religious freedom, and what they esteemed a purer form of religious worship, than was allowed to their choice or presented to their imitation in the old world. The love of religious liberty is a stronger sentiment, when fully excited, than an attachment to civil or political freedom. That freedom which conscience demands, and which

men feel bound by their hopes of salvation to contend for, can hardly fail to be attained. Conscience in the cause of religion and the worship of the deity, prepares the mind to act and to suffer beyond almost all other causes. It sometimes gives an impulse so irresistible, that no fetters of power or of opinion can withstand it. History instructs us that this love of religious liberty, a compound sentiment in the breast of man, made up of the clearest sense of right and the highest conviction of duty, is able to look the sternest despotism in the face; and with means, apparently the most inadequate, to shake principalities and powers. There is a boldness, a spirit of daring, in religious reformers, not to be measured by the general rules which control men's purposes and actions. If the hand of power be laid upon it, this only seems to augment its force and its elasticity, and to cause its actions to be more formidable and terrible. Human invention has devised nothing, human power has compassed nothing, that can forcibly restrain it when it breaks forth. Nothing can stop it but to give way to it; nothing can check it but indulgence. It loses its power only when it has gained its object. The principle of toleration, to which the world has come so slowly, is at once the most just and the most wise of all principles. Even when religious feeling takes a character of extravagance and enthusiasm, and seems to threaten the order of society, and shake the columns of the soci al edifice, its principal danger is in its restraint. If it be allowed indulgence and expansion like the elemental fires, it only agitates, and perhaps purifies the atmosphere, while its efforts to throw off restraint would burst the world asunder.

« AnteriorContinuar »