olastic in thought and language; permit me to say,
Mr. Matthew Arnold. I appeal to him if I am not right when I say that it
is by a language in common that all differences of origin sooner or
later we are welded together--that Etruscans, and Sabines, and Oscans,
and Romans, became one family as Latins once, as Italians now? Before
that agency of one language in common have not all differences of
ancestral origin in England between Britons, Saxons, Danes, and Normans,
melted away; and must not all similar differences equally melt away in
the nurseries of American mothers, extracting the earliest lessons of
their children from our own English Bible, or in the schools of
preceptors who must resort to the same models of language whenever they
bid their pupils rival the prose of Macaulay and Prescott, or emulate
the verse of Tennyson and Longfellow? Now, it seems to me that nothing
can more quicken the sense of that relationship which a language in
common creates, than the presence and voice of a writer equally honored
and beloved in the old world and in the new; and I cannot but think that
where-ever our American kinsfolk welcome that presence, or hang
spell-bound on that voice, they will feel irresistibly how much of
fellowship and unison there is between the hearts of America and
England. So that when our countrymen quits their shores he will leave
behind him many a new friend to the old fatherland which greets them
through him so cordially in the accents of the mother tongue. And in
those accents what a sense of priceless obligations--obligations
personal to him and through him to the land he represents--must steal
over his American audience! How many hours in which pain and sickness
have changed into cheerfulness and mirth beneath the wand of this
enchanter! How many a combatant beaten down in the battle of life--and
nowhere is the battle of life more sharply waged than in the
commonwealth of America--has caught new hope, new courage, new force
from the manly lessons of this unobtrusive teacher!

Gentlemen, it is no wonder that the rising generation of people who have
learned to think and to feel in our language, should eagerly desire to
see face to face the man to whose genius, from their very childhood,
they have turned for warmth and for light as instinctively as young
plants turn to the sun. But I must not forget that it is not I whom you
have come to hear; and all I might say, if I had to vindicate the fame
of our