EAST AND WEST.
Thomas Buchanan Read, a distinguished American artist and poet. Born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1822; died in New York, May 11, 1872. From his "Emigrant's Song."[60]
Leave the tears to the maiden, the fears to the child, While the future stands beckoning afar in the wild; For there Freedom, more fair, walks the primeval land, Where the wild deer all court the caress of her hand. There the deep forests fall, and the old shadows fly, And the palace and temple leap into the sky. Oh, the East holds no place where the onward can rest, And alone there is room in the land of the West!
THE PRIMITIVE PITCH.
The Rev. Myron W. Reed, a distinguished American clergyman of Denver, Colo. From an address delivered in 1892.
The best thing we can do for the world is to take care of America. Keep our country up to the primitive pitch. In front of my old home, in another city, is the largest elm in the county. It never talked, it never went about doing good. It stood there and made shade for an acre of children, and a shelter for all the birds that came. It stood there and preached strength in the air by wide-flung branches, and strength in the earth by as many and as long roots as limbs. It stood, one fearful night, the charge of a cyclone, and was serene in the March morning. It proclaimed what an elm could be. It set tree-planters to planting elms. So America preaches, man capable of self-government; preaches over the sea, a republic is safer than any kingdom. Men have outgrown kings. We shall remember Walt Whitman, if only for a line, "O America! we build for you because you build for the world."
MORAL PROGRESS.
William Henry Seward, an eminent American statesman. Born at Florida, Orange County, N. Y., May 16, 1801; died at Auburn, N. Y., October 10, 1872.
A kind of reverence is paid by all nations to antiquity. There is no one that does not trace its lineage from the gods, or from those who were especially favored by the gods. Every people has had its age of gold, or Augustine age, or historic age—an age, alas! forever passed. These prejudices are not altogether unwholesome. Although they produce a conviction of declining virtue, which is unfavorable to generous emulation, yet a people at once ignorant and irreverential would necessarily become licentious. Nevertheless, such prejudices ought to be modified. It is untrue that in the period of a nation's rise from disorder to refinement it is not able to continually surpass itself. We see the present, plainly, distinctly, with all its coarse outlines, its rough inequalities, its dark blots, and its glaring deformities. We hear all its tumultuous sounds and jarring discords. We see and hear the past through a distance which reduces all its inequalities to a plane, mellows all its shades into a pleasing hue, and subdues even its hoarsest voices into harmony. In our own case, the prejudice is less erroneous than in most others. The Revolutionary age was truly a heroic one. Its exigencies called forth the genius, and the talents, and the virtues of society, and they ripened amid the hardships of a long and severe trial. But there were selfishness and vice and factions then as now, although comparatively subdued and repressed. You have only to consult impartial history to learn that neither public faith, nor public loyalty, nor private virtue, culminated at that period in our own country; while a mere glance at the literature, or at the stage, or at the politics of any European country, in any previous age, reveals the fact that it was marked, more distinctly than the present, by licentious morals and mean ambition. It is only just to infer in favor of the United States an improvement of morals from their established progress in knowledge and power; otherwise, the philosophy of society is misunderstood, and we must change all our courses, and henceforth seek safety in imbecility, and virtue in superstition and ignorance.