but pitiable births. Brush these away; and
let us think of the great dead--let us look on the great living--and,
strong in memory and hope, be confident in the cause of Freedom. "Great
men _have been_ among us--better none;" and can it be said that _now_
there is "a want of books and men," or that those we have are mere
dwarfs and duodecimos? Is there no energy, no spirit of adventure and
enterprise, no passion in the character of our country? Has not wide
over earth

"England sent her men, of men the chief,
To plant the Tree of Life, to plant fair Freedom's Tree?"

Has not she, the Heart of Europe and the Queen, kindled America into
life, and raised up in the New World a power to balance the Old, star
steadying star in their unconflicting courses? You can scarce see her
shores for ships; her inland groves are crested with towers and temples;
and mists brooding at intervals over her far-extended plains, tell of
towns and cities, their hum unheard by the gazer from her glorious
hills. Of such a land it would need a gifted eye to look into all that
is passing within the mighty heart; but it needs no gifted eye, no
gifted ear, to see and hear there the glare and the groaning of great
anguish, as of lurid breakers tumbling in and out of the caves of the
sea. But is it or is it not a land where all the faculties of the soul
are free as they ever were since the Fall? Grant that there are
tremendous abuses in all departments of public and private life; that
rulers and legislators have often been as deaf to the "still small
voice" as to the cry of the million; that they whom they have ruled,
and for whom they have legislated often so unwisely or wickedly, have
been as often untrue to themselves, and in self-imposed idolatry

"Have bow'd their knees
To despicable gods."

Yet base, blind, and deaf (and better dumb) must be he who would deny,
that here Genius has had, and now has, her noblest triumphs; that Poetry
has here kindled purer fires on loftier altars than ever sent up their
incense to Grecian skies; that Philosophy has sounded depths in which
her torch was not extinguished, but, though bright, could pierce not the
"heart of the mystery" into which it sent some strong illuminations;
that Virtue here has had chosen champions victorious in their martyrdom;
and Religion her ministers and her servants not unworthy of her whose
title is from heaven.

Causes there have been, are, and ever will