Humanity's bodyguard! We shall not again disparage America, now that we have seen what men it will bear. We see we thank you for it a new era, worth to mankind all the treasure and all the lives it has cost; yes, worth to the world the lives of all this genera tion of American men, if they had been demanded.' XVII ADDRESS AT THE DEDICATION OF THE SOLDIERS' MONUMENT IN CONCORD, APRIL 19, 1867 "THEY have shown what men may do, Count, who can, the fields they have pressed, BROWNELL. "THINK you these felt no charms In their gray homesteads and embowered farms ? Their evening step should lighten up no more? In fields their boyish feet had known? In trees their fathers' hands had set, Widening each year their leafy coronet ? For those unsolid goods that seem so much our own? These things are dear to every man that lives, And life prized more for what it lends than gives. Yea, many a tie, through iteration sweet, Strove to detain their fatal feet; And yet the enduring half they chose, Whose choice decides a man life's slave or king, The invisible things of God before the seen and known: With echoes gathering on from zone to zone; And, where it lightened once, from age to age, LOWELL, Concord Ode. ADDRESS DEDICATION OF SOLDIERS' MONUMENT IN CONCORD, APRIL 19, 1867 F ELLOW CITIZENS: The day is in Concord doubly our calendar day, as being the anniversary of the invasion of the town by the British troops in 1775, and of the departure of the company of volunteers for Washington, in 1861. We are all pretty well aware that the facts which make to us the interest of this day are in a great degree personal and local here; that every other town and city has its own heroes and memorial days, and that we can hardly expect a wide sympathy for the names and anecdotes which we delight to record. We are glad and proud that we have no monopoly of merit. We are thankful that other towns and cities are as rich; that the heroes of old and of recent date, who made and kept America free and united, were not rare or solitary growths, but sporadic over vast tracts of the Republic. Yet, as it is a piece of nature and the common sense that the throbbing chord that |