Speeches: Literary and Social | Page 6

an honourable subsistence, I
would rather have the affectionate regard of my fellow men, than I
would have heaps and mines of gold. But the two things do not seem to
me incompatible. They cannot be, for nothing good is incompatible
with justice; there must be an international arrangement in this respect:
England has done her part, and I am confident that the time is not far
distant when America will do hers. It becomes the character of a great

country; FIRSTLY, because it is justice; SECONDLY, because without
it you never can have, and keep, a literature of your own.
Gentlemen, I thank you with feelings of gratitude, such as are not often
awakened, and can never be expressed. As I understand it to be the
pleasant custom here to finish with a toast, I would beg to give you:
AMERICA AND ENGLAND, and may they never have any division
but the Atlantic between them.

SPEECH: FEBRUARY 7, 1842.

Gentlemen,--To say that I thank you for the earnest manner in which
you have drunk the toast just now so eloquently proposed to you--to
say that I give you back your kind wishes and good feelings with more
than compound interest; and that I feel how dumb and powerless the
best acknowledgments would be beside such genial hospitality as yours,
is nothing. To say that in this winter season, flowers have sprung up in
every footstep's length of the path which has brought me here; that no
country ever smiled more pleasantly than yours has smiled on me, and
that I have rarely looked upon a brighter summer prospect than that
which lies before me now, {4} is nothing.
But it is something to be no stranger in a strange place--to feel, sitting
at a board for the first time, the ease and affection of an old guest, and
to be at once on such intimate terms with the family as to have a
homely, genuine interest in its every member--it is, I say, something to
be in this novel and happy frame of mind. And, as it is of your creation,
and owes its being to you, I have no reluctance in urging it as a reason
why, in addressing you, I should not so much consult the form and
fashion of my speech, as I should employ that universal language of the
heart, which you, and such as you, best teach, and best can understand.
Gentlemen, in that universal language--common to you in America,
and to us in England, as that younger mother-tongue, which, by the
means of, and through the happy union of our two great countries, shall
be spoken ages hence, by land and sea, over the wide surface of the
globe--I thank you.
I had occasion to say the other night in Boston, as I have more than
once had occasion to remark before, that it is not easy for an author to
speak of his own books. If the task be a difficult one at any time, its

difficulty, certainly, is not diminished when a frequent recurrence to the
same theme has left one nothing new to say. Still, I feel that, in a
company like this, and especially after what has been said by the
President, that I ought not to pass lightly over those labours of love,
which, if they had no other merit, have been the happy means of
bringing us together.
It has been often observed, that you cannot judge of an author's
personal character from his writings. It may be that you cannot. I think
it very likely, for many reasons, that you cannot. But, at least, a reader
will rise from the perusal of a book with some defined and tangible
idea of the writer's moral creed and broad purposes, if he has any at all;
and it is probable enough that he may like to have this idea confirmed
from the author's lips, or dissipated by his explanation. Gentlemen, my
moral creed--which is a very wide and comprehensive one, and
includes all sects and parties--is very easily summed up. I have faith,
and I wish to diffuse faith in the existence--yes, of beautiful things,
even in those conditions of society, which are so degenerate, degraded,
and forlorn, that, at first sight, it would seem as though they could not
be described but by a strange and terrible reversal of the words of
Scripture, "God said, Let there be light, and there was none." I take it
that we are born, and that we hold our sympathies, hopes, and energies,
in trust for the many, and not for the few. That we cannot hold in too
strong a light of disgust and contempt, before the view of others, all
meanness, falsehood, cruelty, and oppression, of every grade and