XVII

ADDRESS

AT THE DEDICATION OF THE SOLDIERS' MONUMENT IN CONCORD, APRIL 19, 1867

"THEY have shown what men may do,
They have proved how men may die,

Count, who can, the fields they have pressed,
Each face to the solemn sky!"'

BROWNELL.

"THINK you these felt no charms

In their gray homesteads and embowered farms ?
In household faces waiting at the door

Their evening step should lighten up no more?

In fields their boyish feet had known?

In trees their fathers' hands had set,
And which with them had grown,

Widening each year their leafy coronet ?
Felt they no pang of passionate regret

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:
Therefore their memory inspiration blows

With echoes gathering on from zone to zone;
For manhood is the one immortal thing
Beneath Time's changeful sky,

And, where it lightened once, from age to age,
Men come to learn, in grateful pilgrimage,
That length of days is knowing when to die."

LOWELL, Concord Ode.

ADDRESS

DEDICATION OF SOLDIERS' MONUMENT IN CONCORD, APRIL 19, 1867

ELLOW CITIZENS: The day is in

FE!

day, 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

holds us to our kindred, our friends and our

no mat

town, is not to be denied or resisted, ter how frivolous or unphilosophical its pulses, - we shall cling affectionately to our houses, our river and pastures, and believe that our visitors will pardon us if we take the privilege of talking freely about our nearest neighbors as in a family party; — well assured, meantime, that the virtues we are met to honor were directed on aims which command the sympathy of every loyal American citizen, were exerted for the protection of our common country, and aided its triumph.

The town has thought fit to signify its honor for a few of its sons by raising an obelisk in the square. It is a simple pile enough, -a few slabs of granite, dug just below the surface of the soil, and laid upon the top of it; but as we have learned that the upheaved mountain, from which these discs or flakes were broken, was once a glowing mass at white heat, slowly crystallized, then uplifted by the central fires of the globe: so the roots of the events it appropriately marks are in the heart of the universe. I shall say of this obelisk, planted here in our quiet plains, what Richter says of the volcano in the fair landscape of Naples: "Vesuvius stands in this poem

of Nature, and exalts everything, as war does the age."

The art of the architect and the sense of the town have made these dumb stones speak; have, if I may borrow the old language of the church, converted these elements from a secular to a sacred and spiritual use; have made them look to the past and the future; have given them a meaning for the imagination and the heart. The sense of the town, the eloquent inscriptions the shaft now bears, the memories of these martyrs, the noble names which yet have gathered only their first fame, whatever good grows to the country out of the war, the largest results, the future power and genius of the land, will go on clothing this shaft with daily beauty and spiritual life. 'T is certain that a plain stone like this, standing on such memories, having no reference to utilities, but only to the grand instincts of the civil and moral man, mixes with surrounding nature, by day with the changing seasons, by night the stars roll over it gladly, - becomes a sentiment, a poet, a prophet, an orator, to every townsman and passenger, an altar where the noble youth shall in all time come to make his secret vows.'

The old Monument, a short half-mile from