Читать книгу Beadle's Dime National Speaker, Embodying Gems of Oratory and Wit, Particularly Adapted to American Schools and Firesides - Various - Страница 5

It has been the custom, from the remotest antiquity, to preserve and to hand down to posterity, in bronze and in marble, the counterfeit presentment of illustrious men.

Your long rows of quarried granite may crumble to the dust; the cornfields in yonder villages, ripening to the sickle, may, like the plains of stricken Lombardy, a short time ago, be kneaded into bloody clods, by the maddening wheels of artillery; this populous city, like the old cities of Etruria and the Campagna Romana, may be desolated by the pestilence which walketh in darkness, may decay with the lapse of time, and the busy mart, which now rings with the joyous din of trade, become as lonely and still as Carthage or Tyre, as Babylon and Nineveh, but the names of the great and good shall survive the desolation and the ruin; the memory of the wise, the brave, the patriotic, shall never perish. Yes, Sparta is a wheat field; a Bavarian prince holds court at the foot of the Acropolis; the traveling virtuoso digs for marbles in the Roman Forum and beneath the ruins of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; but Lycurgus and Leonidas, and Miltiades and Demosthenes, and Cato and Tully "still live;" and Webster still lives, and all the great and good shall live in the heart of ages, while marble and bronze shall endure; and when marble and bronze have perished, they shall "still live" in memory so long as men shall reverence Law, and honor Patriotism, and love Liberty!

That solemn event, which terminates the material existence, becomes by the sober revisions of contemporary judgment, aided by offices of respectful and affectionate commemoration, the commencement of a nobler life on earth. The wakeful eyes are closed, the feverish pulse is still, the tired and trembling limbs are relieved from their labors, and the aching head is laid to rest on the lap of its mother earth, like a play-worn child at the close of a summer's day; but all that we honored and loved in the living man begins to live again in a new and higher being of influence and fame. It was given but to a limited number to listen to the living voice of Daniel Webster, and they can never listen to it again; but the wise teachings, the grave admonitions, the patriotic exhortations which fell from his tongue will be gathered together and garnered up in the memory of millions. The cares, the toils, the sorrows; the conflicts with others, the conflicts of the fervent spirit with itself; the sad accidents of humanity, the fears of the brave, the follies of the wise, the errors of the learned; all that dashed the cup of enjoyment with bitter drops and strewed sorrowful ashes over the beauty of expectation and promise; the treacherous friend, the ungenerous rival, the mean and malignant foe; the uncharitable prejudice which withheld the just tribute of praise, the human frailty which wove sharp thorns into the wreath of solid merit – all these in ordinary cases are buried in the grave of the illustrious dead; while their brilliant talents, their deeds of benevolence and public spirit, their wise and eloquent words, their healing counsels, their generous affections, the whole man, in short, whom we revered and loved and would fain imitate, especially when his image is impressed upon our recollections by the pencil or the chisel, goes forth to the admiration of the latest posterity. Extinctus amabitur idem.