PURITAN AND SPARTAN HEROISM.

145

of anguish? Should they point to the murderers of their fathers, their husbands, and their children, and lift up their voice, and implore your aid to arrest an evil which had made them desolate, could you disregard their cry? Before their eyes could you approach the poll, and patronize by your votes the destroyers of their peace? Had you beheld a dying father conveyed bleeding and agonizing to his distracted family, had you heard their piercing shrieks, and witnessed their frantic agony; would you reward the savage man who had plunged them in distress? Had the duellist destroyed your neighbor-had your own father been killed by the man who solicits your suffrage--had your son, laid low by his hand, been brought to your door pale in death, and weltering in blood-would you then think the crime a small one? Would you honor with your confidence, and elevate to power by your vote, the guilty monster? And what would you think of your neighbors, if, regardless of your agony, they should reward him? And yet, such scenes of unutterable anguish are multiplying every year Every year the duellist is cutting down the neighbor of somebody. Every year, and many times in the year, a father is brought dead or dying to his family, or a son laid breathless at the feet of his parents; and every year you are patronizing by your votes the men who commit these crimes, and looking with cold indifference upon, and even mocking, the sorrows of your neighbors. Beware-I admonish you to beware, and especially such of you as have promising sons preparing for active life, lest, having no feelings for the sorrows of another, you be called to weep for your own sorrow; lest your sons fall by the hand of the very murderer for whom you vote, or by the hand of some one whom his example has trained for the work of blood.

CVI-PURITAN AND SPARTAN HEROISM.

RUFUS CHOATE.

If one were called on to select the more glittering of the instances of military heroism to which the admiration of the world has been most constantly attracted, he would make choice, I imagine, of the instance of that desperate valor, in which, in obedience to the laws, Leonidas and his three hun

dred Spartans cast themselves headlong, at the passes of Greece, on the myriads of their Persian invaders. From the simple page of Herodotus, longer than from the Amphyctionic monument, or the games of the commemoration, that act still speaks to the tears and praise of all the world. Yet I agree with a late brilliant writer, in his speculation on the probable feelings of that devoted band, left alone awaiting, till day should break, the approach of a certain death, in that solitary defile. Their enthusiasm and their rigid and Spartan spirit, which had made all ties subservient to obedience to the law, all excitement tame to that of battle, all pleasure dull to the anticipation of glory, probably made the hours preceding death the most enviable of their lives. They might have exulted in the same elevated fanaticism, which distinguished afterwards the followers of Mahomet, and saw that opening paradise in immortality below, which the Mussulman beheld in anticipation above! Judge if it were not so; judge, if a more decorative and conspicuous stage was ever erected for the transaction of a deed of fame. Every eye in Greece, every eye throughout the world of civilization, throughout even the uncivilized and barbaric East, was felt to be turned directly upon the playing of that brief part There passed round that narrow circle in the tent, the stern, warning image of Sparta, pointing to their shields, and saying, "With these to-morrow, or upon them." Consider, too, that the one concentrated and comprehensive sentiment, graved on their souls as by fire and by steel, by all the influences of their whole life, by the mothers' lips, by the fathers' example, by the law, by venerated religious rites, by public opinion, strong enough to change the moral quality of things, by the whole fashion and nature of Spartan culture, was this; seek first, seek last, seek always, the glory of conquering or falling in a "well fought field." Judge, if, that night as they watched the dawn of the last morning their eyes could ever see; as they heard with every passing hour the stilly hum of the invading hosts, his dusky lines stretched out without end, and now almost encircling them around; as they remembered their unprofaned home, city of heroes and of the mother of heroes,--judge if, watching them in the gate-way of Greece, this sentiment did not grow to the nature of madness, if it did not run in torrents of literal fire to and from the laboring heart; and when morning came and passed, and they had dressed their long locks for battle, and

APPEAL IN BEHALF OF GREECE.

147

when, at a little after noon, the countless invading throng was seen at last to move, was it not with a rapture, as if all the joy, all the sensation of life, was in that one moment, that they cast themselves, with the fierce gladness of mountain torrents, headlong on that brief revelry of glory!

I acknowledge the splendor of that transaction in all its aspects. I admit its morality, too, and its useful influence on every Grecian heart, in that greatest crisis of Greece. And yet, do you not think that whoso could, by adequate description, bring before you that winter of the Pilgrims, its brief sunshine, the nights of storm, slow waning; the damp and icy breath, felt to the pillow of the dying; its destitutions; its contrast with all their former experience in life; its utter insulation and loneliness; its death-beds and burials; its memories; its apprehensions; its hopes; the counsels of the prudent; the prayers of the pious; the occasional cheerful hymn, in which the strong heart threw off its burthen, and asserting its unvanquished nature, went up like a bird of dawn to the skies,-do ye not think that whoso could describe them, calmly waiting in that defile, lonelier and darker than Thermopylæ, for a morning that might never dawn, or might show them, when it did, a mightier arm than the Persian raised as in act to strike, would he not sketch a scene of more difficult and rarer heroism? A scene, as Wordsworth has said, “melancholy, yea, dismal, yet consolatory and full of joy;" a scene, even better fitted, to succor, to exalt, to lead the forlorn hopes of all great causes, till time shall be no more!

CVII.-APPEAL IN BEHALF OF GREECE

HENRY CLAY.

THERE is reason to apprehend, that a tremendous storm is ready to burst upon our happy country-one which may call into action all our vigor, courage and resources. Is it wise or prudent, in preparing to breast the storm, if it must come, to talk to this nation of its incompetency to repel European aggression to lower its spirit, to weaken its moral energy, and to qualify it for easy conquest and base submission? If there be any reality in the dangers which are supposed to encompass us, should we not animate the people, and adjure them

to believe, as I do, that our resources are ample; and that we can bring into the field a million of freemen, ready to exhaust their last drop of blood, and to spend the last cent in the defence of the country, its liberty, and its institutions? Sir, are these, if united, to be conquered by all Europe combined? All the perils to which we can possibly be exposed, are much less in reality, than the imagination is disposed to paint them. No, sir, no united nation, that resolves to be free, can be conquered. And has it come to this? Are we so humbled, so low, so debased, that we dare not express our sympathy for suffering Greece? That we dare not articulate our detesta

tion of the brutal excesses of which she has been the bleeding victim, lest we might offend some one or more of their imperial and royal majesties?

Sir, it is not for Greece alone that I desire to see this measure adopted. It will give to her but little support, and that purely of a moral kind. It is principally for America, for the credit and character of our common country, for our own unsullied name, that I hope to see it pass. Mr. Chairman, what appearance on the page of history would a record like this exhibit?" In the month of January, in the year of our Lord and Saviour, 1824, while all European Christendom beheld, with cold and unfeeling indifference, the unexampled wrongs and inexpressible miseries of Christian Greece, a proposition was made in the Congress of the United States, almost the sole, the last, the greatest depository of human hope and human freedom, the representatives of a gallant nation, containing a million of freemen ready to fly to arms, while the people of that nation were spontaneously expressing its deep-toned feeling, and the whole continent by one simultaneous emotion, was rising, and solemnly and anxiously supplicating and invoking high heaven to spare and succor Greece, and to invigorate her arms in her gloricus cause, while temples and senate-houses were alike resounding with one burst of generous and holy sympathy; in the year of our Lord and Saviour

that Saviour of Greece and of us—a proposition was offered in the American Congress to send a messenger to Greece, to inquire into her state and condition, with a kind expression of our good wishes and our sympathies-and it was rejected!" Go home, if you can; go home, if you dare, to your constituents, and tell them that you voted it down; meet, if you can, the appalling countenances of those who sent you here, and tell them that you shrank from the declaration of your

ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE PILGRIMS.

149

own sentiments; that you cannot tell how, but that some unknown dread, some indescribable apprehension, some indefinable danger, drove you from your purpose; that the spectres of cimeters, and crowns, and crescents, gleamed before you and alarmed you; and that you suppressed all the noble feelings prompted by religion, by liberty, by national independence, and by humanity! I cannot bring myself to believe, that such will be the feeling of a majority of the com mittee. But, for myself, though every friend of the cause should desert it, and I be left to stand alone with the gentlemau from Massachusetts, I will give to this resolution the poor sanction of my unqualified approbation.

CVIII-ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE PILGRIMS.

EDWARD EVERETT,

WERE it only an act of rare adventure, were it a trait in foreign or ancient history, we should fix upon the achievements of our fathers as one of the noblest deeds in the annals of the world. Were we attracted to it by no other feeling than that sympathy we feel in all th fortunes of our race, it could lose nothing, it must gain, in the contrast, with whatever history or tradition has preserved to us of the wanderings and the settlements of the tribes of man. A continent, for the first time, effectually explored; a vast ocean, traversed by men, women, and children, voluntarily exiling themselves from the fairest portions of the Old World; and a great nation grown up, in the space of two centuries, on the foundation so perilously laid by this feeble band-point me to the record, or to the tradition of anything that can enter into competition with it! It is the language, not of exaggeration, but of truth and soberness, to say that there is nothing in the accounts of Phoenician, of Grecian, or of Roman colonization, that can stand in the comparison.

Accomplishing all they projected,-what they projected was the least part of what has come to pass. Did they propose to themselves a refuge, beyond the sea, from the religious and the political tyranny of Europe? They achieved not that alone, but they have opened a wide asylum to all the victims of oppression throughout the world. We our