the seed that afterward
blossomed into the thought which he expressed many years later:

I have said that patriotism is the preserving virtue of Republics.
Let this virtue wither and selfish ambition assume its place as
the motive for action, and the Republic is lost.

Here, my countrymen, is the sole ground of danger.

Seven miles from Annapolis, where the Severn River flows into Round
Bay, stands Belvoir, a spacious manor-house with sixteen-inch walls,
in which are great windows reaching down to the polished oak floor. In
this home of Francis Key, his grandfather, the young Francis Scott Key
spent a part of the time of his tutelage, preparing for entrance into
St. John's College, the stately buildings of which were erected by a
certain early Key, who had come to our shore to help unlock the gates
of liberty for the world.

The old college, with its historic campus, fits well into the
atmosphere of Annapolis, standing proudly in her eighteenth-century
dignity, watching the rest of the world scramble in a helter-skelter
rush for modern trivialities. Its old walls are in pleasing harmony
with the colonial mansions poised on little hillocks, from which they
look down on you with benevolent condescension and invite you to climb
the long flights of steps that lead to their very hearts, grand but
hospitable, which you do in a glow of high-pitched ambition, as if you
were scaling an arduous but fascinating intellectual height. Having
reached the summit, you stop an instant on the landing, partly for
breathing purposes, but more especially to exult a moment on the
height of triumph.

The four-storied college at the end of Prince George Street--regal
Annapolis would not be content with a street of less than royal
dignity--looks down with pleased approval on its wide expanse of green
campus, for that stretch of ground has a history that makes it worthy
of the noble building which it supports. It spread its greenery to the
view of those window-eyes decades before the Revolution, and when that
fiery torch flamed upon the country's record the college green
furnished a camping place for the freedom-loving Frenchmen who came
over the sea to help set our stars permanently into the blue of our
national sky. In 1812 American troops pitched their tents on the
famous campus, and under the waving green of its summer grasses and
the white canopy of its winter snows men who died for their country's
honor lie in their l