to strike its
roots deep down into the centre of empire, and to shelter beneath its
strong branches, and wide-spread shadows, the exile and the oppressed,
and to furnish home and altar for the pilgrim of civil and religious
freedom.

When we look around now and behold our country, "the observed of all
observers," exalting her "towering head," and "lifting her eyes," the
mind instinctively turns to the colony of Jamestown; and we cannot but
exclaim, in the words of the Psalmist, "Thou hast brought a vine out of
Egypt; Thou hast cast out the heathen and planted it. Thou preparedst
room before it, and didst cause it to take deep root; and it filled the
land. The hills were covered with the shadow of it, and the boughs
thereof were like the goodly cedars. She sent out her boughs unto the
sea, and her branches unto the river." But a sad memory for the days of
toil, and struggle, and blood in that little colony, will remind us that
this tree was not "transplanted from Paradise with all its branches in
full fruitage." Neither was it "sowed in sunshine," nor was it "in
vernal breezes and gentle rains that it fixed its roots, and grew and
strengthened." Oh, no! oh, no! In the mournfully beautiful words of
Coleridge, "With blood was it planted; it was rocked in tempests; the
goat, the ass, and the stag gnawed it, the wild boar whetted its tusk
upon its bark; the deep scars are still extant on its trunk, and the
path of the lightning may be traced among its higher branches!" The
first communion of the body and blood of our Lord was administered by
the pious Hunt, May 4, 1607, the day after the debarkation of the
colonists: and, "here," says the Bishop of Oxford, "on a peninsula, upon
the northern shore of James River, was sown the first seed of
Englishmen, who, in after years, were to grow and to multiply into the
great and numerous American people." It was an offering, this first
sacrament, of the "appointed sacrifice of prayer and thanksgiving;" and
we have an evidence of the pervading spirit of Hunt in that little band,
when we remember that among their very first acts after rearing their
straw-thatched houses for protection from the weather, was to erect the
church of the colony. Hunt was succeeded, after his death, in 1610, by
Master Bucke (the chaplain of Lord de la Ware), whose services were
called forth the very day of his arrival at Jamestown. According to
Purchas, "He (that is Lord Delaware) cast anchor before Jamestown,