who may yet exercise we know not what
sympathy with ourselves; and when it carries us forward, also, and shows
us the long continued result of all the good we do, in the prosperity of
those who follow us, till it bears us from ourselves, and absorbs us in
an intense interest for what shall happen to the generations after us,
it speaks only in the language of our nature, and affects us with
sentiments which belong to us as human beings.

Standing in this relation to our ancestors and our posterity, we are
assembled on this memorable spot, to perform the duties which that
relation and the present occasion impose upon us. We have come to this
Rock, to record here our homage for our Pilgrim Fathers; our sympathy in
their sufferings; our gratitude for their labors; our admiration of
their virtues; our veneration for their piety; and our attachment to
those principles of civil and religious liberty, which they encountered
the dangers of the ocean, the storms of heaven, the violence of savages,
disease, exile, and famine, to enjoy and to establish. And we would
leave here, also, for the generations which are rising up rapidly to
fill our places, some proof that we have endeavored to transmit the
great inheritance unimpaired; that in our estimate of public principles
and private virtue, in our veneration of religion and piety, in our
devotion to civil and religious liberty, in our regard for whatever
advances human knowledge or improves human happiness, we are not
altogether unworthy of our origin.

There is a local feeling connected with this occasion, too strong to be
resisted; a sort of _genius of the place_, which inspires and awes us.
We feel that we are on the spot where the first scene of our history was
laid; where the hearths and altars of New England were first placed;
where Christianity, and civilization, and letters made their first
lodgement, in a vast extent of country, covered with a wilderness, and
peopled by roving barbarians. We are here, at the season of the year at
which the event took place. The imagination irresistibly and rapidly
draws around us the principal features and the leading characters in the
original scene. We cast our eyes abroad on the ocean, and we see where
the little bark, with the interesting group upon its deck, made its slow
progress to the shore. We look around us, and behold the hills and
promontories where the anxious eyes of our fathers first saw the places
of habitation and of rest