President cordially reciprocates the congratulations of Her
Majesty the Queen on the success of the great international
enterprise accomplished by the science, skill, and indomitable
energy of the two countries. It is a triumph more glorious than was
ever won by any conquest on the field of battle. May the Atlantic
telegraph, under the blessing of Heaven, prove to be a bond of
perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations and an
instrument designed by Divine Providence to diffuse religion,
civilisation, liberty and law throughout the world. In this view
will not all nations of Christendom spontaneously unite in the
declaration that it shall be forever neutral, and that its
communications shall be held sacred in passing to their destination,
even in the midst of hostilities.

"JAMES BUCHANAN."

It is interesting to compare the elemental quality, the inner character
of these national flashes of feeling, that came so comparatively soon
after the days of the revolution in America. It was a sort of prose
poetry of the new century. This recollection came back to me, on my
return from Europe, upon the opening of the new Tabernacle, a symbol of
the eternal human progress of the world. Materially and spiritually we
were striving ahead, men of affairs, men of religion, philosophers,
scientists, and poets.

I was present in 1891 at the celebration of Whittier's eighty-fourth
birthday. He was on the bright side of eighty then. The schools
celebrated the day, so should the churches have done, for he was a
Christian poet.

John Greenleaf Whittier was a Quaker. That means that he was a genial,
kind, good man--a simple man. I spent an afternoon with him once in a
barn. We were summering in the mountains near by. We found ourselves in
the barn, where we stretched out on the hay. The world had not spoiled
the simplicity of his nature. It was an afternoon of pastoral peace,
with one who had written himself into the heart of a nation. How much I
learned from that man's childlikeness and simplicity!

If he had lived to be a hundred he would still have remained young. The
long flight of years had not tired his spirit, for wherever the English
language is spoken he will always live. He was born in Christmas week, a
spirit in human shape, come to earth to keep it forever young. He was
the bell-ringer of all youthful ages. And yet he remembered also those
who for any reason