The glorious sun of each “went down while it was yet day.”
Some extracts are here given, from an address delivered by Prentiss before the New England Society of New Orleans, on December 22, 1845. These will be followed by some from Grady’s Boston speech. Prentiss at the time named, was about the same age that Grady was when he died. In opening Prentiss said: “This is a day dear to the sons of New England, and ever held by them in sacred remembrance. On this day, from every quarter of the globe, they gather in spirit around the Rock of Plymouth, and hang upon the urn of their Pilgrim fathers, the garlands of filial gratitude and affection. We have assembled for the purpose of participating in this honorable duty—of performing this pious pilgrimage. To-day we will visit that memorable spot. We gaze upon the place where a feeble band of persecuted exiles founded a mighty nation; and our hearts will exult with proud gratification, as we remember that on that barren shore our ancestors planted not only empire, but freedom.
“Of the future but little is known; clouds and darkness rest upon it. We yearn to become acquainted with its hidden secrets—we stretch out our arms toward its shadowy inhabitants—we invoke our posterity, but they answer us not. We turn for relief to the past, that mighty reservoir of men and things. There we are introduced into Nature’s vast laboratory, and witness her elemental labors. We mark with interest the changes in continents and oceans, by which she has notched the centuries. With curious wonder we gaze down the long aisles of the past, upon the generations that are gone. We behold as in a magic glass, men in form and feature like ourselves, actuated by the same motives, urged by the same passions, busily engaged in shaping out both their own destinies and ours. We approach them, and they refuse not our invocation. We hold converse with the wise philosophers, the sage legislators, and divine poets. But most of all among the innumerable multitudes that peopled the past, we seek our own ancestors, drawn toward them by an irresistible sympathy. With reverent solicitude we examine into their character and actions, and as we find them worthy or unworthy, our hearts swell with pride or our cheeks glow with shame.”
Speaking of the simplicity of the Pilgrim habits, Prentiss goes on: “In founding their colony they sought neither wealth nor conquest; but only peace and freedom. From the moment they touched the shore, they labored with orderly, systematic and persevering industry. They cultivated, without a murmur, a poor and ungrateful soil, which even now yields but a stubborn obedience to the dominion of the plow. They brought with them neither wealth nor power, but the principles of civil and religious freedom. They cherished, cultivated and developed them to a full and luxuriant maturity; and furnished them to their posterity as the only sure and permanent foundations for free government. We are proud of our native land, and turn with fond affection to its rocky shores. Behold the thousand temples of the Most High, that nestle in its happy valleys and crown its swelling hills. See how their glittering spires pierce the sky—celestial conductors ready to avert the lightning of an angry heaven!”
Himself the son of a ship-builder, he thus speaks of the enterprise of the Pilgrims: “They have wrestled with Nature, till they have prevailed against her, and compelled her reluctantly to reverse her own laws. The sterile soil has become productive under their sagacious culture, and the barren rock, astonished, finds itself covered with luxuriant and unaccustomed verdure. Upon the banks of every river they build temples of industry, and stop the squanderings of the spendthrift waters. They bind the Naiades of the brawling stream; they drive the Dryades from their accustomed haunts, and force them to desert each favorite grove: for from river, creek, and bay they are busy transforming the crude forests into staunch and gallant vessels. From every inlet and indenture along the rocky shore, swim forth these ocean-birds—born in the wildwood—fledged upon the wave. Behold how they spread their white pinions to the favoring breeze, and wing their flight to every quarter of the globe—the carrier pigeons of the world!”
But lastly how brimming with pathos, how pregnant with patriotic ardor, is the following: “Glorious New England! Thou art still true to thy ancient fame, and worthy of thy ancestral honors. We thy children have assembled in this far-distant land to celebrate thy birthday. A thousand fond associations throng upon us, roused by the spirit of the hour. On thy pleasant valleys rest, like sweet dews of the morning, the gentle recollections of our early life; around thy hills and mountains cling like gathering mists the mighty memories of the Revolution; and far away on the horizon of the past, gleam like thine own Northern lights, the awful virtues of our Pilgrim sires. But while we devote this day to the remembrance of our native land, we forget not that in which our happy lot is cast. We exult in the reflection that, though we count by thousands the miles which separate us from our birthplace, still our country is the same. We have but changed our chamber in the paternal mansion; in all its rooms we are at home, and all who inhabit it are our brothers. We are no exiles meeting upon the banks of a foreign river, to swell its waters with our home-sick tears. Here floats the same banner which nestled above our boyish heads, except that its mighty folds are wider, and its glittering stars increased in number.”
The sound of this eloquent tongue was stilled, but the “divine afflatus” with which it was tuned was transferred to, and continued in another. Near the birthplace of the noble Prentiss, and surrounded by those who were proud of his fame, Grady referred to those surroundings and the objects of his visit, when he said: “Happy am I that this mission has brought my feet at last to press New England’s historic soil, and my eyes to the knowledge of her beauty and her thrift. Here within touch of Plymouth Rock and Bunker Hill—where Webster thundered and Longfellow sang, Emerson thought, and Channing preached—here in the cradle of American letters, and almost of American liberty, I hasten to make the obeisance that every American owes New England, when first he stands uncovered in her mighty presence. Strange apparition! This stern and unique figure, carved from the ocean and the wilderness, its majesty kindling and growing amid the storms of winters and of wars,—until at last the gloom was broken, its beauty disclosed in the sunshine, and the heroic workers rested at its base,—while startled kings and emperors gazed and marveled that from the rude touch of this handful, cast on a bleak and unknown shore, should have come the embodied genius of human government, and the perfected model of human liberty! God bless the memory of those immortal workers, and prosper the fortunes of their living sons, and perpetuate the inspiration of their handiwork.”
Faithful to the memories of his childhood, and to the devotion of his mature years, visions of his distant home rise to his mental eye, and with a master’s magic touch he spreads the picture on the glowing canvas: “Far to the South, Mr. President, separated from this section by a line once defined in irrepressible difference, once traced in fratricidal blood, and now, thank God, but a vanishing shadow, lies the fairest and richest domain of this earth. It is the home of a brave and hospitable people. There is centered all that can please or prosper human kind. A perfect climate above a fertile soil, yields to the husbandman every product of the temperate zone. There, by night, the cotton whitens beneath the stars, and the wheat locks the sunshine in its bearded sheaf. In the same field the clover steals the fragrance of the wind, and the tobacco catches the quick aroma of the rains.”
In speaking of southern citizenship, and the perils of its present environment, Grady says: “The resolute, clear-headed, broad-minded men of the South, the men whose genius made glorious every page of the first seventy years of American history—whose courage and fortitude you tested in five years of the fiercest war—whose energy has made bricks without straw, and spread splendor amidst the ashes of their war-wasted homes—these men wear this problem in their hearts and their brains, by day and by night. They realize, as you cannot, what this problem means, what they owe to this kindly and dependent race, the measure of their debt to the world in whose despite they defended and maintained slavery. And though their feet are hindered in its undergrowth, and their march encumbered with its burdens, they have lost neither the patience from which comes clearness, nor the faith from which comes courage. Nor, sir, when in passionate moments is disclosed to them that vague and awful shadow, with its lurid abysses and its crimson stains, into which I pray God they may never go, are they struck with more of apprehension than is needed to complete their consecration!”
The conclusion of that grand address, so powerful in scope and faultless in diction, is a forcible reminder of Webster’s great peroration in his reply to Hayne on Foot’s Resolution. Grady here says: “A mighty duty, sir, and a mighty inspiration impels every one of us to-night to lose in patriotic consecration whatever estranges, whatever divides. We, sir, are Americans, and we fight for human liberty. The uplifting force of the American idea is under every throne on earth. France, Brazil—these are our victories. To redeem the earth from kingcraft and oppression, this is our mission. And we shall not fail. God has sown in our soil the seed of his millennial harvest, and he will not lay the sickle to the ripening crop until his full and perfect day has come. Our history, sir, has been a constant and expanding miracle from Plymouth Rock and Jamestown, all the way, aye, even from the hour when, from the voiceless and trackless ocean, a new world rose to the sight of the inspired sailor. As we approach the fourth centennial of that stupendous day—when the old world will come to marvel and to learn, amid our gathered treasures—let us resolve to crown the miracles of our past with the spectacle of a Republic compact, united, indissoluble in the bonds of love—loving from the Lakes to the Gulf—the wounds of war healed in every heart as on every hill, serene and resplendent at the summit of human achievement and earthly glory, blazing out the path and making clear the way up which all the nations of the earth must come in God’s appointed time!”