se, therefore,
the health of Lord Houghton."]

MR. BRYANT AND GENTLEMEN:--In finding myself here now for the
first time, I am agitated by conflicting emotions, by my pleasure in
being among you, and by my regret at not having been here before.

In alluding to my poetic experience, Mr. Bryant mentioned that I had
passed many years of my early life in Italy, and while he was so doing
there arose in my memory a little incident not inapplicable to my
present position. I passed some time at Venice; and one summer evening,
on the Piazza di San Marco, my attention was attracted by an old man,
who walked up and down with a mingled air of wonder and delight, and
who, after I had observed him for some moments, came and asked me in the
Venetian dialect what streets he was to take toward a certain remote
portion of the city. I said I was a foreigner, and that he, being a
native of the place, must know its geography better than I could. He
then told me that he was there for the first time. He had passed all his
life in his own distinct world, there earning his daily bread, and
occupied by its little local interests. At last a friend had told him
that he must see the Place and Church of San Marco before he died, and
put him in a boat and landed him there, and now he wanted to find his
way home, charmed and contented.

Gentlemen, I am in the position of that Venetian veteran, and shall
return to my country, happy that I have at last found my way to this
great place and habitation--the civitas of English-speaking people. Not
that I have ever failed to regard this country in many senses as my own,
from the time when I took moral comfort from the flight of Mr. Bryant's
"Wild Fowl" across the ocean, and took the best lesson of life from the
Psalm of Longfellow. Since then I have ever been with you in all your
intellectual progress, and in the necessarily checkered course of your
constitutional history, and never more than in the late solemn years, in
all the national difficulties which you have so energetically, so
persistently, and so humanely surmounted.

In looking back to my impressions of those times, I sometimes think that
my sympathy with you was not wholly unselfish, but that I felt that, if
I had ever written anything which has a chance of a prolonged existence,
I should wish it to be read, not by any distracted and impotent
communities of British race, but by America, one and indivisible. And,
gentlemen, this is not unna