THEODORE PARKER.

A REMINISCENCE OF LEXINGTON.

[Extract from Theodore Parker's Speech delivered in his own defence before the Circuit Court in Boston, April 3, 1855. He was being tried for making a speech in Faneuil Hall against the kidnapping of Thomas Simms.]

ONE raw morning in spring-it will be eighty years the nineteenth day of this month-Hancock and Adams, the Moses and Aaron of that Great Deliverance, were both at Lexington; they also had "obstructed an officer" with brave words. British soldiers, a thousand strong, came to seize them and carry them over sea for trial, and so nip the bud of freedom auspiciously opening in that early spring. The town militia came together before daylight "for training." A great, tall man, with a large head and a high, wide brow, their captain-one who had seen service-marshalled them into line, numbering but seventy, and bade "every man load his piece with powder and ball. I will order the first man shot that

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runs away," said he, when some faltered. "Don't fire unless fired upon, but if they want to have war, let it begin here."

Gentlemen, you know what followed; those farmers and mechanics "fired the shot heard around the world." A little monument covers the bones of such as before had pledged their fortune and their sacred honor to the Freedom of America, and that day gave it also their lives. I was born in that little town, and bred up amid the memories of that day. When a boy, my mother lifted me up, one Sunday, in her religious, patriotic arms, and held me while I read the first monumental line I ever saw: "Sacred to Liberty and the Rights of Mankind."

Since then I have studied the memorial marbles of Greece and Rome in many an ancient town; nay, on Egyptian obelisks have I read what was written before the Eternal roused up Moses to lead Israel out of Egypt; but no chiselled stone has ever stirred me to such emotions as those rustic names of men who fell "In the Sacred Cause of God and their Country."

Gentlemen, the spirit of Liberty, the love

of Justice, was early fanned into a flame in my boyish heart. That monument covers the bones of my own kinsfolk; it was their blood which reddened the long, green grass at Lexington. It was my own name which stands chiselled on that stone; the tall captain who marshalled his fellow farmers into stern array and spoke such brave and dangerous words as opened the war of American Independence -the last to leave the field-was my father's father. I learned to read out of his Bible, and with a musket he that day captured from the foe I learned also another religious lesson: that "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." I keep them both "Sacred to Liberty and the Rights of Mankind," to use them both "In the Sacred Cause of God and My Country."

WASHINGTON.

[This beautiful tribute to Washington was written by an Englishman and has been framed and placed in the Washington mansion at Mount Vernon.]

No matter what may be the birthplace of such a man as WASHINGTON, no climate can claim, no country can appropriate him-the boon of Providence to the human race-his fame is eternity and his residence creation.

Though it was the defeat of our arms, and the disgrace of our policy, we almost bless the convulsion in which he had his origin-if the Heavens thundered and the earth rocked, yet when the storm passed, how pure was the climate that it cleared-how bright in the brow of the firmament was the planet it revealed to us!

In the production of Washington-it does really appear as if nature was endeavoring to improve upon herself, and that all the virtues of the ancient world were but so many studies preparatory to the Patriot of the new.

As a general he marshalled the peasant into a veteran and supplied by discipline the absence