what was such a triumph compared with Lafayette's? Not a single city, but a whole nation riding as one man and greeting him with an affectionate embrace! One single day of such spontaneous homage were worth whole years of courtly adulation; one hour might well reward a man for a whole life of danger and of toil. Then, too, the joy with which he must have viewed the prosperity of the people for whom he had so heroically struggled! To behold the nation, which he left a little child, now grown up in the full proportions of lusty manhood! To see the tender sapling, which he had left with hardly shade enough to cover its own roots, now waxing into the sturdy and unwedgable oak, beneath whose grateful umbrage the opprest of all nations find shelter and protection! That oak still grows on its majestic strength, and wider and wider still extend its mighty branches. But the hand that watered it and nourished it while yet a tender plant is now cold; the heart that watched with strong affection its early growth has ceased to beat.

Virtue forms no shield to ward off the arrows of death. Could it have availed even when joined with the prayers of a whole civilized world, then, indeed, this mournful occasion would never have occurred, and the life of Lafayette would have been as immortal as his fame. Yet, tho he has passed from among us; tho that countenance will no more be seen that used to lighten upon the van of Freedom's battles as he led her eaglets to their feast; still has he left behind his better part: the legacy of his bright example, the memory of his deeds. The lisping infant will learn to speak his venerated name. The youth of every country will be taught to look upon his career and to follow in its footsteps. When, hereafter, a gallant people are fighting for freedom against the oppressor, and their cause begins to wane before the mercenary bands of tyranny, then will the name of Lafayette become a watchword that will strike with terror on the tyrant's ear and nerve with redoubled vigor the freeman's arm. At that name many a heart before unmoved will wake in the glorious cause; and many a sword, rustling ingloriously in its scabbard, will

leap forth to battle. But even amid the mourning with which our souls are shrouded, is there not some room for gratulation? Our departed friend and benefactor has gone down to the grave peacefully and quietly at a good, old age. He had performed his appointed work. His virtues were ripe. He had done nothing to sully his fair fame., No blot or soil of envy or calumny can now affect him. His character will stand upon the pages of history, pure and unsullied as the lilied emblem on his country's banner. He has departed from among us; but he has become again the companion of Washington. He has but left the friends of his old age to associate with the friends of his youth. Peace be to his ashes! Calm and quiet may they rest upon some vine-clad hill of his own beloved land! And it shall be called the Mount Vernon of France. And let no cunning sculpture, no monumental marble, deface with its mock dignity the patriot's grave; but rather let the unpruned vine, the wild flower and the free song of the uncaged bird, all that speaks of freedom and of peace be gathered round it. Lafayette needs no mausoleum. His fame is mingled with the nation's history. His epitaph is engraved upon the hearts of men.

ADAMS AND JEFFERSON

BY EDWARD EVERETT

FRIENDS AND FELLOW CITIZENS:-We are assembled beneath the canopy of the weeping heavens, under the influence of feelings in which the whole family of Americans unites with us. We meet to pay a tribute of respect to the revered memory of those to whom the whole country looks up as to its benefactors; to whom it ascribes the merit of unnumbered public services, and especially of the inestimable service of having led in the councils of the Revolution.

It is natural that these feelings, which pervade the whole American people, should rise into peculiar strength and

earnestness in your hearts. In meditating upon these great men, your minds are unavoidably carried back to those scenes of their arduous and honored career, this town and its citizens were so deeply plunged. You can not but remember that your fathers offered their bosoms to the sword, and their dwellings to the flames, from the same spirit which animated the venerable patriarchs whom we now deplore. The cause they espoused was the same which strewed your streets with ashes, and drenched your hilltops with blood. And while Providence, in the astonishing circumstances of their departure, seems to have appointed that the Revolutionary age of America should be closed up by a scene as illustriously affecting as its commencement was disastrous and terrific, you have justly felt it your duty-it has been the prompt dictate of your feelings-to pay, within these hallowed precincts, a well-deserved tribute to the great and good men to whose counsels, under God, it is in no small degree owing that your dwellings have risen from their ashes, and that the sacred dusts of those who fell rests in the bosom of a free and happy land.

It was the custom of the primitive Romans to preserve in the halls of their houses the images of all the illustrious men whom their families had produced. These images are supposed to have consisted of a mask exactly representing the countenance of each deceased individual, accompanied with habiliments of like fashion with those worn in his time, and with the armor, badges, and insignia of his offices and exploits; all so disposed around the sides of the hall as to present, in the attitude of living men, the long succession of the departed; and thus to set before the Roman citizen, whenever he entered or left his house, the venerable array of his ancestors revised in this imposing similitude. Whenever, by a death in the family, another distinguished member of it was gathered to his fathers, a strange and awful procession was formed. The ancestral masks, including that of the newly deceased, were fitted upon the servants of the family, selected of the size and appearance of those whom they were intended to represent, and drawn up in

solemn array to follow the funeral train of the living mourners, first to the market-place, where the public eulogium was pronounced, and then to the tomb. As he thus moved along, with all the great fathers of his name quickening, as it were, from their urns, to enkindle his emulation, the virtuous Roman renewed his vows of respect to their memory, and his resolution to imitate their fortitude, frugality, and patriotism.

Fellow citizens, the great heads of the American family are fast passing away; of the last, of the most honored, two are now no more. We are assembled, not to gaze with awe on the artificial and theatric images of their features, but to contemplate their venerated characters, to call to mind their invaluable services, and to lay up the image of their virtues in our hearts. The two men who stood in a relation in which no others now stand to the whole Union, have fallen. The men whom Providence marked out among the first of the favored instruments to lead this chosen people into the holy land of liberty, have discharged their high office, and are no more. The men whose ardent minds prompted them to take up their country's cause, when there was nothing else to prompt and everything to deter them; the men who afterward, when the ranks were filled with the brave and resolute, were yet in the front of those brave and resolute ranks; the men who were called to the helm when the wisest and most sagacious were needed to steer the newly-launched vessel through the broken waves of the unknown sea; the men, who in their country's happier days, were found most worthy to preside over the Union they had so powerfully contributed to rear into greatness—these men

are now no more.

They have not left us singly and in the sad but accustomed succession appointed by the order of nature; but having lived, acted, and counseled, and risked all, and triumphed and enjoyed together, they have gone together to their great reward. In the morning of life-without previous concert, but with a kindred spirit--they plunged together into a conflict which put to hazard all which makes life precious. When the storm of war and revolution

raged, they stood side by side, on such perilous ground that, had the American cause failed, tho all else had been forgiven, they were of the few whom an incensed empire's vengeance would have pursued to the ends of the earth. When they had served through their long career of duty, forgetting the little that had divided them, and cherishing the great communion of service, and peril, and success, which had united them, they walked in honorable friendship along the declining pathway of age; and now they have sunk down together in peace. Time, and their country's service, a like fortune and a like reward, united them, and the last great scene confirmed the union. They were useful, honored, prosperous, and lovely in their lives, and in their deaths they were not divided.

Happiest at the last, they were permitted almost to choose the hour of their departure; to die on that day on which those who loved them best could have wished they might die. It is related as a singular happiness of Plato that he died in a good old age at a banquet amid flowers and perfumes and festal songs, upon his birthday. Our Adams and Jefferson died on the birthday of the nation; the day which their own deed had immortalized, which their own prophetic spirit had marked out as the great festival of the land; amid the triumphal anthems of a whole grateful people, throughout a country that hailed them as among the first and boldest of her champions in the times that tried men's souls.

Our jubliee, like that of old, is turned into sorrow. Among the ruins of Rome there is a shattered arch, erected by the Emperor Vespasian, when his son Titus returned from the destruction of Jerusalem. On its broken panels and falling frieze are still to be seen, represented as borne aloft in the triumphal procession of Titus, the well-known spoils of the second temple-the sacred vessels of the holy place, the candlestick with seven branches, and in front of all, the silver trumpets of the jubilee, in the hands of captive priests, proclaiming not now the liberty, but the humiliation and the sorrows of Judah. From this mournful spectacle, it is said, the pious and heart-stricken Hebrew, even