The Intermediate Standard Speaker: Containing Pieces for Declamation in ...
By Epes Sargent
Permit me to say, in conclusion, that all history and all wisdom have shown that without love of liberty, without respect for order and for law, you can have no sufficient security that your empire will prove enduring.
LORD ELGIN.
GENTLEM EN, it is the fate of every good cause to encounter sarcasm. Let us remember that, to avoid this kind of attack, we must have on our side that which is impossible and contradictory ; that is, we ought to have for our allies' all the errors and all the passions which mislead the world; we ought to clash with nothing,* to deny nothing, to be in no one's way; in a word, we ought to be nothing.
Point me out the good cause which at its advent was not the object of raillery,t and which was not assailed by similar derision. Not one! No, not one, from one end of history to the other. When the Truth Incarnate appeared in the world, when the Son of God descended upon earth, how was he received by men ? With wrong, with sarcasm, with blas'phemy in their mouths, which they hurled at him. What did they say to him ? " Thou art thyself possessed of a devil, and dost thou cast out devils ? Physician, cure thyself !" Yes! and at that awful and sublime moment when he was carrying out his devotedness to man, to the extreme limit even of self-sacrifice, at the moment of his death, what did the scoffers shout in his ears? " He saved others; himself he cannot save! If thou art the Son of God, come down from the cross !"
Ah! doubtless he had the power of doing so. He might, even in that moment of agony, have manifested himself in all his glory; have confounded his enemies ; have overwhelmed and annihilated them with the dazzling blaze of his omnipotency. But no; he would not. And what was his reply to sarcasm, and scorn, and con'tu-mely?
Not a word, but a fact. He died ! He, omnipotent as he was, remained motionless, nailed to the cross, and then gave up the ghost. With divine calmness he completed his work. He did not save himself; he saved man. And this was his reply to sar: casm.
Gentlemen, I do not compare, I do not présume to institute a comparison, between the work of the Redeemer and that of our
Nothing, pronounce năthing ; none, nin, + Pronounce răllery.
THE FUTURE OF AMERICA.
peace society. Such a comparison would not be permitted me. But our Divine Master set us an example ; and, as he has himself told us, he set us that example, that we should follow it. Let us do so, then; let us do so perseveringly. In spite of all the raillery and sarcasm of the worldly wise, let us persevere in an enterprise which we know to be good and just, and which we think it is our duty to prosecute to the end. Yes, let us all persevere ; ministers of religion, instructors of youth, conductors of the public press ; let us persevere in the straight path of conscience and of truth, and let us not be one instant diverted from our purpose and our course by the fear of a sarcasm. Let us bring to bear all the influence that our speech or our pen may possess, to advance this great and sacred cause of permanent and universal peace.
FROM TIIE FRENCH OF REV. ATIIANASE COQUEREL.
FELLOW-CITIZENS, the hours of this day are rapidly flying, and this occasion * will soon be passed. Neither we nor our children can expect to behold its return. They are in the distant regions of futurity, they exist only in the all-creating power of God, who shall stand here, a hundred years hence, to trace, through us, their descent from the Pilgrims, and to survey, as we have now surveyed, the progress of their country during the lapse of a century. We would anticipate their concurrence with us in our sentiments of deep regard for our common ancestors. We would anticipate and partake the pleasure with which they will then recount the steps of New England's advancement. On the morning of that day, although it will not disturb us in our repose, the voice of acclamation and gratitude, commencing on the rock of Plymouth, shall be transmitted through millions of the sons of the Pilgrims, till it lose itself in the murmurs of the Pacific seas.
We would leave for the consideration of those who shall then occupy our places some proof that we hold the blessings transmitted from our fathers in just estimation; some proof of our attachment to the cause of good government, and of civil and religious liberty ; some proof of a sincere and ardent desire to promote every thing which may enlarge the understandings and improve the hearts of men. And when, from the long distance of a hundred years, they shall look back upon us, they shall know, at least, that we possessed affections, which, running back
* The centennial celebration of the Landing of the Pilgrims, Dec. 22, 1820.
ward and warming with gratitude for what our ancestors have done for our happiness, run forward also to our posterity, and meet them with cordial salutation, ere yet they have arrived on the shore of being.
Advance, then, ye future generations! We would hail you, as you rise in your long succession, to fill the places which we now fill, and to taste the blessings of existence where we are passing, and soon shall have passed, our own human duration. We bid you welcome to this pleasant land of the Fathers. We bid you welcome to the healthful skies and the verdant fields of New England. We greet your accession to the great inheritance which we have enjoyed. We welcome you to the blessings of good government and religious liberty. We welcome you to the treasures of science and the delights of learning. We welcome you to the transcendent sweets of domestic life-to the happiness of kindred, and parents, and children. We welcome you to the immeasurable blessings of rational existence, the immortal hope of Christianity, and the light of everlasting truth!
WEBSTER.
XXXII. - THE INTEMPERATE HUSBAND. It is, my friends, in the degradation of a husband by intemperance, above all, that she, who has ventured every thing, feels that every thing is lost. Woman, silent-suffering, devoted woman, here bends to her direst affliction. The measure of her woe is in truth full, whose husband is a drunkard. Who shall protect her, when he is her insulter, her oppressor ? What shall delight her, when she shrinks from the sight of his face, and trembles at the sound of his voice? The hearth is indeed dark, that he has made desolate. There, through the dull midnight hour, her griefs are whispered to herself, her bruised heart bleeds in secret. There, while the cruel author of her distress is drowned in distant revelry, she holds her solitary vigil, waiting, yet dreading his return that will only wring from her by his unkindness tears even more scalding than those she sheds over his transgression.
To fling a deeper gloom across the present, memory turns back, and broods upon the past. Like the recollection to the sun-stricken pilgrim of the cool spring that he drank at in the morning, the joys of other days come over her, as if only to mock her parched and weary spirit. She recalls the ardent lover, whose graces won her from the home of her infancy; the enraptured father, who bent with such delight over his new-born children ; * and she asks if this can really be he — this sunken being, who has now nothing
TAYLOR AT BUENA VISTA.
for her but the sot's disgusting brutality-nothing for those abashed and trembling children, but the sot's disgusting example!
Can we wonder that, amid these agonizing moments, the tender cords of violated affection should snap asunder? that the scorned and deserted wife should confess, " there is no killing like that which kills the heart"?— that, though it would have been hard for her to kiss for the last time the cold lips of her dead husband, and lay his body for ever in the dust, it is harder to behold him so debasing life, that even his death would be greeted in mercy ?
Had he died in the light of his goodness, bequeathing to his family the inheritance of an untarnished name, the example of virtues that should blossom for his sons and daughters from the tomb — though she would have wept bitterly indeed, the tears of grief would not have been also the tears of shame. But to behold him, fallen away from the station he once adorned, degraded from eminence to ignominy — at home, turning his dwelling to darkness, and its holy endearments to mockery -- abroad, thrust from the companionship of the worthy, a self-branded outlaw — this is the woe that the wife feels is more dreadful than death, that she mourns over as worse than widowhood.
CHARLES SPRAGUE.
XXXIII. - TAYLOR AT BUENA VISTA.
PERÐAPS in the history of the world the power of a single will was never more triumphantly exhibited than it was at Buena Vista. Taylor had been advised to fall back for safety on Monterey — stripped of some of his best troops, far advanced in the enemies' country, with an army numbering only about four thousand, and but one third of them regulars; with no reserved force to support him; with the intelligence brought in that Santa Anna, at the head of twenty thousand men, was marching against him; then he took his position in a gorge of the Sierra Madre, and determined to meet the shock of battle. He would neither retreat nor resign; he would fight.
There flas forth a great spirit! The battle came; the odds were fearful ; but who could doubt the result when American troops stood in that modern Thermopylæ, and in the presence of such a leader? It was in vain that Mexican artillery played upon their ranks, or Mexican infantry bore down with the bayonet, or Mexican lancers charged. The spirit of the great leader pervaded the men who fought with him, and a single glance of his eye could reänimate a wavering column.
Like Napoleon at the Danube, he held his men under fire because he was exposed to it himself; and like him, wherever he rode along the lines mounted on a white charger, a conspicuous mark for balls, men would stand and be shot down, but they would not give way. Of Taylor on that day it may be said, as it has been said of Lannes at Montebello, " He was the rock of that battle-field, around which men stood with a tenacity which nothing could move. If he had fallen, in five minutes that battle would have been à rout." That battle closed Gen. Taylor's military career, and that battle alone gives him a title to immortality.
H. W. HILLIARD.
XXXIV. - LITERARY PURSUITS.
You will perhaps be told, fellow-students, that literary pursuits will disqualify you for the activo business of life. Heed not the idle assertion. Reject it as a mere imagination, inconsistent with principle, unsupported by experience. Point out to those who make it, the illustrious characters who have reaped in every age the highest honors of studious and active exertion. Show them Demosthenes, forging by the light of the midnight lamp those thunderbolts of eloquence which
" Shook the arsenal, and fulmined over Greece
To Macedon and Artaxerxes' throne." Ask them if Cicero would have been hailed with rapture as the father of his country, if he had not been its pride and pattern in philosophy and letters. Inquire whether Cæsar, or Frederick, or Bonaparte, or Wellington, or Washington, fought the worse because they knew how to write their own commentaries. Remind them of Franklin, tearing at the same time the lightning from heaven, and the scepter from the hands of the oppressor.
Do they say to you that study will lead you to skepticism? Recall to their memory the venerable names of Bacon, Milton, Newton, and Locke. Would they persuade you that devotion to learning will withdraw your steps from the paths of pleasure ? Tell them they are mistaken. Tell them that the only true pleasures are those which result from the diligent exercise of all the faculties of body, and mind, and heart, in pursuit of noble ends by noble means. Repeat to them the ancient apologue of the youthful Hercules, in the pride of strength and beauty, giving up his gen