CHAPTER XV.
ORATIONS AND ESSAYS.
IN Pages from an old Volume of Life, one of the latest books published by Doctor Holmes, we have a collection of most delightful orations and essays. Some of them we recognize as old, familiar friends. "Bread and the Newspaper," for instance, recalls vividly those sad, terribly earnest days when the civil war was rending not only our land but our hearts. Something to eat, and the daily papers to read—these we must have, no matter what else we had to give up!
War taught us, as nothing else could, what we really were. It exalted our manhood and our womanhood, and showed us our substantial human qualities for a long time kept out of sight, it may be, by the spirit of commerce, the love of art, science, or literature. Those who had called Doctor Holmes "an aristocrat," "a Tory," forgot all their bitter feelings when he said, "We are finding out that not only 'patriotism is eloquence,' but that heroism is gentility. All ranks are wonderfully equalized under the fire of a masked battery. The plain artisan, or the rough fireman, who faces the lead and iron like a man, is the truest representative we can show of the heroes of Crécy and Agincourt. And if one of our fine gentlemen puts off his straw-colored kids and stands by the other, shoulder to shoulder, or leads him on to the attack, he is as honorable in our eyes and in theirs as if he were ill-dressed and his hands were soiled with labor.
In The Inevitable Trial, an oration delivered on the 4th of July, 1863, before the City Authorities of Boston, Doctor Holmes who had been falsely classed among the enemies of the Anti-slavery movement, spoke as follows:—
"Long before the accents of our famous statesmen resounded in the halls of the Capitol, long before the Liberator opened its batteries, the controversy now working itself out by trial of battle was foreseen and predicted. Washington warned his countrymen of the danger of sectional divisions, well knowing the line of clearage that ran through the seemingly solid fabric. Jefferson foreshadowed the judgment to fall upon the land for its sins against a just God. Andrew Jackson announced a quarter of a century beforehand that the next pretext of revolution would be slavery. De Tocqueville recognized with that penetrating insight which analyzed our institutions and conditions so keenly, that the Union was to be endangered by slavery not through its interests, but through the change of character it was bringing about in the people of the two sections, the same fatal change which George Mason, more than half a century before, had declared to be the most pernicious effect of the system, adding the solemn warning, now fearfully justifying itself in the sight of his descendants, that 'by an inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities.'
"The Virginian romancer pictured the far-off scenes of the conflict which he saw approaching as the prophets of Israel painted the coming woes of Jerusalem, and the strong iconoclast of Boston announced the very year when the curtain should rise on the yet unopened drama.
"The wise men of the past, and the shrewd men of our own time, who warned us of the calamities in store for our nation, never doubted what was the cause which was to produce first alienation and finally rupture. The descendants of the men, 'daily exercised in tyranny,' the 'petty tyrants,' as their own leading statesmen called them long ago, came at length to love the institution which their fathers had condemned while they tolerated. It is the fearful realization of that vision of the poet where the lost angels snuff up with eager nostrils the sulphurous emanations of the bottomless abyss,—so have their natures become changed by long breathing the atmosphere of the realm of darkness."
In this same grand oration occur also these eloquent words:—