The appropriate quotation caused a thrill to run through the assembled students, while they cast ominous looks at each other. For the life of him, Sears could not resist a smile.
At this Mr. Patterson glanced at us with a quiet meaning, and turning to Mr. Sears, he continued: “The elder Adams taught school—he whose eloquence Jefferson has so loudly lauded—the man who was for liberty or death, and so expressed himself in that beautiful letter to his wife. Do you not remember that passage, sir, where he speaks of the Fourth being greeted thereafter with bonfires and illuminations? His son, Johnny Q., taught school. My dark-eyed friend Webster, who is now figuring so gloriously in the halls of Congress and in the Supreme Court, taught school. Judge Rowan, of Kentucky, a master spirit too, taught school. Who was that
‘Who passed the flaming bounds of time and space,
The living throne, the sapphire blaze,
Where angels tremble as they gaze:
Who saw, but, blasted with excess of light,
Closed his eyes in endless night’—
Who was he? Milton, the glorious, the sublime—who, in his aspirations for human liberty, prayed to that great spirit who, as he himself says, “sends forth the fire from his altar to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleaseth”—Milton, the schoolmaster.
‘If fallen in evil days on evil tongues,
Milton appealed to the avenger, Time: