Young bucks and beauties, ye who now deride
The reasonable dress of other days;
When time your forms shall have puffed out or dried,
Then on your present portraits you will gaze,
And say what dowdies, frights, and guys you were,
With their more precious figures to compare.
Think, if you live till you are lean or fat,
Your features blurred, your eyes bedimm'd with age,
Your limbs have stiffen'd; feet grown broad and flat:
You may see other garments all the rage,
Preposterous as even that attire
Which you in mirrors now so much admire.
[LOYALTY TO LIBERTY OUR ONLY HOPE.—Bishop Whipple, of Minnesota.]
The love of country is the gift of God—it can not dwell in homes of sin, it has no abiding place in saloons of vice or dens of infamy, it belongs not to infidel clubs or fanatical conventions, they would tear down the sacred edifice which they have never loved; they are impatient for change, for in the seething caldron of rebellion they are brought to the surface. With nothing to lose, they have no fear of the days of terror; their only dread is in the majesty of the law. The love of country belongs to a God-fearing people; it is seen in the purity of private life, in the privacy of Christian homes, in the devotions of the closet, in the manliness of Christian character. The church is its nursing mother. Loyalty to God and to His institutions is her first and last lesson; it is the earnest cry of her loyal children "that peace and happiness, truth and justice, religion and piety may be established among us for all generations." The love of country belongs to loyal men. The power of self-government depends upon a loyal people.
The protection of the nation depends not on the wisdom of its senators, not on the vigilance of its police, not on the strong arm of standing armies: but the loyalty of a united people. Other nations have equaled us in all the arts of civilization, in discoveries, in science, in skill, and in invention; they have kept even step with us and often surpassed us in philosophy and literature; they have been brave in war and wise in council; they have clustered around their homes all that art can lavish of beauty—but ripe scholarship, cunning in art, or skill in invention, never gave to the people a constitution. This is the outgrowth of a manly spirit of loyalty. It teaches men duty—a right manly word for right manly men. Loyalty was God's gift to our fathers; it was learned in the hard school of adversity, and by self-denial and suffering inwrought into the nation's life; it grew up in the sheltered valleys and on the rocky hillsides of New England, it was cradled in Virginia, in New York, in the Carolinas, among the patricians of Virginia; it gave to the world a Washington, and from the shop, the store, the farm, and professional life there sprung up from the people many who shared his spirit to become the founders of the Republic.