Thou art the firm, unshaken rock On which we rest; And rising from thy hardy stock, Thy sons the tyrant's frowns shall mock, And slavery's galling chains unlock, All, who the wreath of Freedom twine We love thy rude and rocky shore, Let foreign navies hasten o’er, And peal their cannon's loudest roar, They still shall find, our lives are given JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 5. ENGLAND'S RELATIONS TO AMERICA. THE laws of England, founded on principles of liberty, are still in substance the code of America. Our writers, our statutes, the most modern decisions of our judges, are quoted in every court of justice from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi. English law, as well as English liberty, is the foundation on which the legislation of America is founded. The authority of our jurisprudence may survive the power of our government for as many ages as the laws of Rome commanded respect and the reverence of Europe after the subversion of her empire. Our language is as much that of America as it is that of England. As America increases, the glory of the great writers of England increases with it; the admirers of Shakspeare and Milton are multiplied; and the fame of every future Englishman is widely spread. Is it unreasonable, then, to hope that these ties of birth, of liberty, of laws, of language, and of literature, may in time prevail over vulgar, ignoble, and ruinous prejudice? Their ancestors were as much the countrymen of Bacon and Newton, of Hampden and Sydney, as ours. They are entitled to their full share of that inheritance of glory which has descended from our common ancestors. Neither the liberty of England, nor her genius, nor the noble language which that genius has consecrated, is worthy of their disregard. All these honors are theirs if they choose to preserve them. The history of England, till the adoption of counsels adverse to liberty, is their history. We may still preserve or revive kindred feelings. They may claim noble ancestors, and we may look forward to noble descendants. JAMES MACINTOSH. 6. NEW ENGLAND AND VIRGINIA. THERE are circumstances of peculiar and beautiful correspondence in the careers of Virginia and New England, which must ever constitute a bond of sympathy, affection, and pride between their children. Not only did they form respectively the great northern and southern rallying points of civilization on this continent; not only was the most friendly competition or the most cordial cooperation, as circumstances allowed, kept up between them during their early colonial existence, but who forgets the generous emulation, the noble rivalry, with which they continually challenged and seconded each other in resisting the first beginnings of British aggression, in the persons of their James Otises and Patrick Henrys? Who forgets that while that resistance was first brought to a practical test in New England, at Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, Fortune reserved for Yorktown of Virginia the last crowning battle of Independence? Who forgets that while the hand by which the original. Declaration of Independence was drafted, was furnished by Virginia, the tongue by which the adoption of that instrument was defended and secured, was furnished by New England, a bond of common glory, upon which not Death alone seemed to set his seal, but Deity, I had almost said, to affix an immortal sanction, when the spirits by which that hand and voice were moved, were caught up together to the clouds on the same great Day of the Nation's Jubilee. ROBERT CHARLES WINTHROP. 7. THE PILGRIMS OF NEW ENGLAND. WE meet again, the children of the Pilgrims, to remember our fathers. The two centuries and more which interpose to hide them from our eye centuries so brilliant with progress, so crowded with incidents, so fertile in accumulations dissolve for the moment as a curtain of cloud, and we are once more at their side. The grand and pathetic series of their story unrolls itself about us, vivid as if with the life of yesterday. All the stages by which they were slowly formed from the general mind and character of England, the tenderness of conscience, the sense of duty, force of will, trust in God, the love of truth, and the spirit of liberty by which they were advanced from Englishmen to Pilgrims, from Pilgrims to the founders of a free church, and the fathers of a free people, in a new world, come before us. The voyage of the "Mayflower;" the landing; the slow winter's night of disease and famine in which so many, the good, the beautiful, the brave, sank down and died, giving place at last to the spring-dawn of health and plenty, come before us. The meeting with the old red race on the hill beyond the brook; the treaty of peace. unbroken for half a century; the organization of a Republican form of government in the "Mayflower's" cabin; the planting of these kindred, coeval, and auxiliary institutions, without which such a government could no more live than the uprooted tree can put forth leaf and flower, come before us. And with these come institutions to diffuse pure religion, good learning, austere morality, plain living, and high thinking; the laying deep and sure, far down on the Rock of Ages, the foundation-stone of that imperial structure whose dome now swells towards Heaven. All these things, high, holy, and beautiful, come thronging fresh on our memories, such as we have heard them from our mother's lips; such as we have heard them in the history of kings, of religion, and of liberty. They gather themselves about us, familiar, certainly, but of an interest that can never die, an interest heightened by their relations to that eventful future into which they have expanded, and through whose light they shine. It is their festival we have come to keep to-day. It is their tabernacle we have come to build. It is not ourselves, our present, or our future; it is not political economy, or political philosophy, of which you would have me to-day say a word. We would speak of certain valiant, good peculiar men, our fathers. We would wipe the dust from a few old, noble urns. We would recall the forms and the lineaments of the honored dead, - forms and features which the grave has not changed; over which the grave has no power; robed in the vestments and all radiant with the hues of an assured immortality. RUFUS CHOATE. 8. THE PURITAN. THE Puritans were men who derived a peculiar character from the daily contemplation of superior beings and eternal interests. Not content with acknowledging in general terms an overruling Providence, they habitually ascribed every event to the will of the Great Being, for whose power nothing was too vast, for whose inspection nothing was too minute. To know Him, to serve Him, to enjoy Him, was with them the great end of existence. They rejected with contempt the ceremonious homage which other sects substituted for the pure worship of the soul. They aspired to gaze upon the intolerable brightness of the Deity, and to commune with Him, face to face. Hence their contempt for worldly distinctions. The difference between the greatest and the meanest seemed to vanish, when compared with the boundless interval which separated the whole race from Him on whom their eyes were constantly fixed. If they were unacquainted with the works of philosophers and poets, they were deeply read in the oracles of God. Thus the Puritan was made up of two different men: one, all self-abasement, penitence, gratitude, passion; the other, proud, calm, inflexible, sagacious. People who saw nothing of the godly but their uncouth visages, and heard nothing from them but their groans and their hymns, might laugh at them. But those had little reason to laugh who encountered them in the hall of debate, or on the field of battle. They brought to civil and military affairs a coolness of judgment and an immutability of purpose which some writers have thought inconsistent with their religious zeal, but which were, in fact, the effects of it. The intensity of their feelings on one subject made them tranquil on every other. Death had lost |