Читать книгу Revisiting the Earth - James Langdon Hill - Страница 15

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Congress voted unanimously in 1824 to invite Lafayette to visit this country. He was received everywhere with great demonstrations of popular enthusiasm and his progress through the country resembled a continuous triumphal procession. He visited, in succession, each of the twenty-four states, and all the principal cities which vied to do him honor, but relatively he was unmoved. A splendid coach was at his service. He passed beneath an elaborate arch blazoned with words of welcome, but Lafayette relatively was unmoved. Sitting quietly with no expectation excited, before a screen in a public assembly, the curtain lifted and there stood his birthplace, in speaking beauty and suggestiveness and all the deeps of his heroic nature were broken up and he sobbed audibly like a child. The strong old home still held him to its heart.

How is such a birthplace marked? Chiefly by a gush of rich emotion in the heart of him who claims it as his own. Nature attends to that. A boy has warm affections. A birthplace may have no Forefathers' Rock. Peregrine White was not born there. No Charter Oak or Washington Elm, with living dignity may identify the place. There may be no cellar which concealed the royal judges, nor any door pierced by Indian bullets, nor drums which awaked the sleepers at Lexington and Concord, yet it is distinctively sacred to one's childhood days. It has the deep endearment of a darling home.

"I remember, I remember

The house where I was born

The little window where the sun

Came peeping in at morn."

"Where is my home? I want to go before dark," said a spirited little fellow of three years. The action of his inner nature was like the turning of the needle to the pole. Thus an unfortunate child will put up a fight for his birthright and he will not yield without returning to the struggle. He wants his heritage.