'Three from the sultry South, three from the storm-beat shore,
Three parts from distant mountains' cloudy store,
While raging heat fused all with three parts more!'"
You see, dear Tom, these audiences are always good-natured, and by no means critical of your version.
Why, at the only time I was ever at a regimental dinner on the Plains, long before the war, you know, when to the untaught mind it did seem as if there was no reason why we were there, and no pretence for mutual congratulation, I remember when poor Pendergrast called me up to represent science, (I was at that time in the telegraph business,) the dear old quotation came to my relief like an inspiration. I got round to the Flag. Do you remember how safe General Halleck always found it to allude to the Flag?
"The Flag, gentlemen,"—"colors,"—"rainbow of our liberties,"—"Liberty everywhere." "Blue, white, and red of Low Countries,"—"Red, white, and blue of France,"—"English Constitution,"—"Puritan fathers, Cavaliers," &c., &c.
"Does it seem too much to say, gentlemen, that, with the divine instinct of poetry, the unequalled bard of the court of Augustus, looking down the ages beyond the sickly purple of the palace, to the days when armies should be the armies of freemen, and not the Prætorian guards of a tyrant,—that he veiled the glad prophecy of the future in the words in which he describes even the thunderbolt itself? The white crest of the foam, the blue of the sky, the red of the fiery furnace, are all tossed together, and play together, and rejoice together, there in the smiles or in the rage of the very breeze of Heaven.
'Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosæ
Addiderant, tres rutili ignis, tres alitis Austri.'
'Three parts of white the crested billows lent,
Three parts of blue the heavens themselves had sent,
Three parts of fiery red with these were blent,
And on the free-born wind across the world they went.'"
You are not old enough, my dear nephew, to remember the great consistory which the Pope held at Somerville, when for a moment he thought that the churches of the world had recognized that Union which in fact does make them one, and were willing to offer one front to the Devil, instead of fighting, as they always had done, on ten thousand hooks of their own. You understand, it was not this pope, Pius IX. It was the pope who came after Gregory XVII. and before Pius IX. Well, at that immense dinner-table, which had been built on the plan of John O'Groat's, so that each of the eleven thousand six hundred and thirty popes present might sit at the head,—I was fortunate enough to be appointed to represent the Sandemanian clergy,—the only body, as I will venture to say to you, which really preserves the simplicity of Gospel institutions, or in the least carries into our own time the spirit and life of fundamental Christianity. Now you may imagine the difficulty of speaking on such an occasion. I had thought it proper to speak in Latin. The difficulty was not so much in the language as in what to say, that one might be at once brave as a Sandemanian, and at the same time tolerant, and catholic as a Christian. Now it is not for me to say how well I acquitted myself. If you want to see my speech, you had better look in the Annales de Foi; and, if it is there, you will certainly find it. I did not think it amiss, certainly, that I was able to close by comparing the great agencies which the United Church would be able to employ to the thunderbolt itself. We had there present bishops from England of perpetual rain, from Sitka of perpetual cloud, from the eternal fires of the torrid zone, and from the farthest south of Patagonia. When we selected our sacred twelve, it was easy for us to take them, as if we were forging thunders.
"Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosæ
Addiderant, tres rutili ignis, tres alitis Austri."
Now, my dear Tom, I am sure my lesson needs no moral. Of course I do not think you had better start in life with my quotation. To tell you the truth, I am still young. I am a life-member of many societies, and, as they outlive other usefulness, the more frequently do they dine together. I may therefore have some other occasion when I may be reminded of the Cyclops. But if, at your dinner, I had happened to be called upon, I think,—I do not know, but I think that, seeing such men as you describe, I should have been irresistibly led to consider the varied gifts which the University every year scatters over the land, and the exquisite harmony by which, from such different callings, different homes, and different destinies, they unite in the merriment or in the wisdom of her festivities. The men of practice who have been taming the waterfall, and made it subservient; the men of the gentle ministries of peace, whose blessings distil upon us like the very dews of heaven; and the men of the spoken word,—of the spirit of truth, of which, like the wind itself, no man knoweth whence it cometh or whither it goeth,—these, and the men of war who have passed through its fires to give us the free America of to-day, all were around you. Surely in such a union I should have been reminded of the divine harmony by which elements the most diverse were welded into the bolts of Jove.