CALEB CUSHING'S ADDRESS. 365 



Generation after generation may give themselves up to 

 slaughter in civil or foreign war ; dynasty follow dynasty, each 

 with new varieties of oppression or misrule ; the fratricidal rage 

 of domestic factions rend the entrails of their common country ; 

 temples, and basilica, and capitols, crumble to dust ; proud 

 navies melt into the yeast of the sea ; and all that art fitfully 

 does to perpetuate itself, disappear like the phantasm of a 

 troubled dream ; but nature is everlasting ; and, above the wreck 

 and uproar of our vain devices and childish tumults, the tute- 

 lary stars continue to sparkle upon us from their distant spheres ; 

 the sun to pour out his vivifying rays of light and heat over 

 the earth ; the elements to dissolve in grateful rain ; the ma- 

 jestic river to roll on his fertilizing waters unceasingly ; and the 

 ungrudging soil to yield up the plenteousness of its harvest 

 year after year to the hand of the husbandman. 



He, the husbandman, is the servant of those divine elements 

 of earth and air ; he is the minister of that gracious, that benign, 

 that bounteous, that fostering, that nourishing, that renovating, 

 that inexhaustible, that adorable nature ; and as such the stew- 

 ardship of our nationality is in him. 



God has in all times vouchsafed to our country, ministers of 

 religion, whose hearts and whose life were touched as with 

 holy fire from his altar ; soldiers, of whom the very name 

 sounds in the mind's ear as a trumpet-call to battle and victory ; 

 statesmen, the glory of whose eloquence, whose wisdom, whose 

 patriotism, will descend to future ages, obscuring in the efful- 

 gence of its light all Greek and Roman fame. God has made 

 us of that Anglo-Saxon race, which Tacitus commemorates of 

 old, as inclined to shun the crowded city, and to choose its 

 abodes by the sparkling fountain, or along the green glades, or 

 in the solemn depths of the forest ; whose passion is land ; 

 whose individualism, whose genius of separation and self-action, 

 whose rural tendencies, render it especially apt for that period, 

 in the career of a political community, when land is super- 

 abundant with it, and when the uncultivated earth is to be re- 

 claimed to the dominion of man. God has endowed us with 

 courage, energy, activity, genius, invention, industry, love of 

 knowledge, improvement, and virtue, at least equal to those of 



