Speeches: Literary and Social | Page 4

my
nature, so vanquished and subdued, that I have hardly fortitude enough
to thank you. If your President, instead of pouring forth that delightful
mixture of humour and pathos which you have just heard, had been but
a caustic, ill- natured man--if he had only been a dull one--if I could
only have doubted or distrusted him or you, I should have had my wits
at my fingers' ends, and, using them, could have held you at arm's-
length. But you have given me no such opportunity; you take advantage
of me in the tenderest point; you give me no chance of playing at
company, or holding you at a distance, but flock about me like a host of
brothers, and make this place like home. Indeed, gentlemen, indeed, if
it be natural and allowable for each of us, on his own hearth, to express
his thoughts in the most homely fashion, and to appear in his plainest
garb, I have a fair claim upon you to let me do so to-night, for you have
made my home an Aladdin's Palace. You fold so tenderly within your
breasts that common household lamp in which my feeble fire is all
enshrined, and at which my flickering torch is lighted up, that straight
my household gods take wing, and are transported there. And whereas
it is written of that fairy structure that it never moved without two
shocks--one when it rose, and one when it settled down--I can say of
mine that, however sharp a tug it took to pluck it from its native ground,
it struck at once an easy, and a deep and lasting root into this soil; and

loved it as its own. I can say more of it, and say with truth, that long
before it moved, or had a chance of moving, its master--perhaps from
some secret sympathy between its timbers, and a certain stately tree
that has its being hereabout, and spreads its broad branches far and
wide--dreamed by day and night, for years, of setting foot upon this
shore, and breathing this pure air. And, trust me, gentlemen, that, if I
had wandered here, unknowing and unknown, I would--if I know my
own heart--have come with all my sympathies clustering as richly
about this land and people--with all my sense of justice as keenly alive
to their high claims on every man who loves God's image--with all my
energies as fully bent on judging for myself, and speaking out, and
telling in my sphere the truth, as I do now, when you rain down your
welcomes on my head.
Our President has alluded to those writings which have been my
occupation for some years past; and you have received his allusions in
a manner which assures me--if I needed any such assurance--that we
are old friends in the spirit, and have been in close communion for a
long time.
It is not easy for a man to speak of his own books. I daresay that few
persons have been more interested in mine than I, and if it be a general
principle in nature that a lover's love is blind, and that a mother's love is
blind, I believe it may be said of an author's attachment to the creatures
of his own imagination, that it is a perfect model of constancy and
devotion, and is the blindest of all. But the objects and purposes I have
had in view are very plain and simple, and may be easily told. I have
always had, and always shall have, an earnest and true desire to
contribute, as far as in me lies, to the common stock of healthful
cheerfulness and enjoyment. I have always had, and always shall have,
an invincible repugnance to that mole-eyed philosophy which loves the
darkness, and winks and scowls in the light. I believe that Virtue shows
quite as well in rags and patches, as she does in purple and fine linen. I
believe that she and every beautiful object in external nature, claims
some sympathy in the breast of the poorest man who breaks his scanty
loaf of daily bread. I believe that she goes barefoot as well as shod. I
believe that she dwells rather oftener in alleys and by-ways than she
does in courts and palaces, and that it is good, and pleasant, and
profitable to track her out, and follow her. I believe that to lay one's

hand upon some of those rejected ones whom the world has too long
forgotten, and too often misused, and to say to the proudest and most
thoughtless--"These creatures have the same elements and capacities of
goodness as yourselves, they are moulded in the same form, and made
of the same clay; and though ten times worse than you, may, in having
retained