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the metropolis, now so mighty a center of nations, and fit ally of international law-next came Pittsburg, the immense manufacturing workshop, alike memorable for its moral power and its natural advantages, which made it a link with the great valley of the West, a cradle of a new world, which is linked in its turn to the old world by boundless agricultural interests. And after the people of Pennsylvania have thus spoken, here now I stand in the temple of this people's sovereignty, with joyful gratitude acknowledging the inestimable benefits of this public reception, wherewith the elected of Pennsylvania, intrusted with the legislative and executive power of the sovereign people, gather into one garland the public opinion, and with the authority of their high position announce loudly to the world the principles, the resolution, and the will of the two millions of this great commonwealth. Sir, the words your Excellency has honored me with will have their weight throughout the world. The jeering smile of the despots, which accompanied my wandering, will be changed, at the report of these proceedings, to a frown. which may yet cast fresh mourning over families, as it has over mine; nevertheless, the afflicted will wait to be consoled by the dawn of public happiness. From the words which your Excellency spoke, the nations will feel double resolution to shake off the yoke of despotism. The proceedings of to-day will, moreover, have their weight in the development of public opinion in other States of your united republic. Governor! I plead no dead cause. Europe is no corpse; it has a future yet, because it wills. Sir, from the window of your room, which your hospitality has opened to me, I saw suspended a musket and a powder horn, and this motto "Material Aid." And I believe that the Speaker of the House of Representatives of Pennsylvania is seated in that chair whence the Declaration of American Independence was signed. The first is what Europe wants in order to have the success of the second. Permit me to take this for a happy augury; and allow me with the plain words of an honest mind to give you the assurance of my country's warm, everlasting gratitude, in which, upon the basis of our restored independence, a wide field will be opened to mutual benefit by friendly commercial intercourse, ennobled by the consciousness of imparted benefit on your side, and by the pleasant duty of gratitude on the side of Hungary, which so well deserves your generous sympathy.

§ 75

TRIBUTE TO WASHINGTON IRVING

By Charles Dickens

(Response at the banquet given in his honor during his first visit to America, New York City, February 18, 1842. Washington Irving presided at the banquet.) GENTLEMEN: I don't know how to thank you-I really don't know how. You would naturally suppose that my former experience would have given me this power, and that the difficulties in my way would have been diminished; but I assure you the fact is exactly the reverse, and I have completely balked the ancient proverb that "a rolling stone gathers no moss"; and in my progress to this city I have collected such a weight of obligations and acknowledgment-I have picked up such an enormous mass of fresh moss at every point, and was so struck by the brilliant scenes of Monday night, that I thought I could never by any possibility grow any bigger. I have made continually new accumulations to such an extent that I am compelled to stand still, and can roll no more!

Gentlemen, we learn from the authorities, that, when fairy stones, or balls, or rolls of thread, stopped at their own accord as I do notit presaged some great catastrophe near at hand. The precedent holds good in this case. When I have remembered the short time I have before me to spend in this land of mighty interests, and the poor opportunity I can at best have of acquiring a knowledge of, and forming an acquaintance with it, I have felt it almost a duty to decline the honors you so generously heap upon me, and pass more quietly among you. For Argus himself, though he had but one mouth for his hundred eyes, would have found the reception of a public entertainment once a week too much for his greatest activity; and, as I would lose no scrap of the rich instruction and the delightful knowledge which meet me on every hand (and already I have gleaned a great deal from your hospitals and common jails),—I have resolved to take up my staff, and go my way rejoicing, and for the future to shake hands with America, not at parties but at home; and, therefore, gentlemen, I say to-night, with a full heart, and an honest purpose, and grateful feelings, that I bear, and shall ever bear, a deep sense of your kind, your affectionate and your noble greetCHARLES DICKENS. English novelist. Born February 7, 1812, at Landport, England. Died on June 9, 1870, at Highan, England.

ing, which it is utterly impossible to convey in words. No European sky without, and no cheerful home or well-warmed room within, shall ever shut out this land from my vision. I shall often hear your words of welcome in my quiet room, and oftenest when most quiet; and shall see your faces in the blazing fire. If I should live to grow old, the scenes of this and other evenings will shine as brightly to my dull eyes fifty years hence as now; and the honors you bestow upon me shall be well remembered and paid back in my undying love, and honest endeavors for the good of my race.

Gentlemen, one other word with reference to this first person singular, and then I shall close. I came here in an open, honest, and confiding spirit, if ever man did, and because I felt a deep sympathy in your land; had I felt otherwise, I should have kept away. As I came here, and am here, without the least admixture of one-hundredth part of one grain of base alloy, without one feeling of unworthy reference to self in any respect, I claim, in regard to the past, for the last time, my right in reason, in truth, and in justice, to approach, as I have done on two former occasions, a question of literary interest. I claim that justice be done; and I prefer this claim as one who has a right to speak and be heard. I have only to add that I shall be as true to you as you have been to me. I recognize, in your enthusiastic approval of the creatures of my fancy, your enlightened care for the happiness of the many, your tender regard for the afflicted, your sympathy for the downcast, your plans for correcting and improving the bad, and for encouraging the good; and to advance these great objects shall be, to the end of my life, my earnest endeavor, to the extent of my humble ability. Having said thus much with reference to myself, I shall have the pleasure of saying a few words with reference to somebody else.

There is in this city a gentleman who, at the reception of one of my books I well remember it was "The Old Curiosity Shop"-wrote to me in England a letter so generous, so affectionate, and so manly, that if I had written the book under every circumstance of disappointment, of discouragement, and difficulty, instead of the reverse, I should have found in the receipt of that letter my best and most happy reward. I answered him, and he answered me, and so we kept shaking hands autographically, as if no ocean rolled between us. I came here to this city eager to see him, and [laying his hand upon Irving's shoulder] here he sits! I need not tell you how happy and delighted I am to see him here to-night in this capacity.

Washington Irving! Why, gentlemen, I don't go upstairs to bed two nights out of the seven-as a very creditable witness near at hand can testify-I say I do not go to bed two nights out of the seven without

taking Washington Irving under my arm; and, when I don't take him I take his own brother, Oliver Goldsmith. Washington Irving! Why, of whom but him was I thinking the other day when I came up by the Hog's Back, the Frying Pan, Hell Gate, and all these places? Why, when, not long ago, I visited Shakespeare's birthplace, and went beneath the roof where he first saw light, whose name but his was pointed out to me upon the wall? Washington Irving-Diedrich Knickerbocker-Geoffrey Crayon-why, where can you go that they have not been there before? Is there an English farm-is there an English stream, an English city, or an English country-seat, where they have not been? Is there no Bracebridge Hall in existence? Has it no ancient shades or quiet streets?

In bygone times, when Irving left that Hall, he left sitting in an old oak chair, in a small parlor of the Boar's Head, a little man with a red nose, and an oilskin hat. When I came away he was sitting there still! -not a man like him, but the same man-with the nose of immortal redness and the hat of an undying glaze! Crayon, while there, was on terms of intimacy with a certain radical fellow, who used to go about, with a hatful of newspapers, woefully out at elbows, and with a coat of great antiquity. Why, gentlemen, I know that man-Tibbles the elder, and he has not changed a hair; and, when I came away, he charged me to give his best respects to Washington Irving!

Leaving the town and the rustic life of England-forgetting this man, if we can-putting out of mind the country churchyard and the broken heart-let us cross the water again, and ask who has associated himself most closely with the Italian peasantry and the bandits of the Pyrenees? When the traveler enters his little chamber beyond the Alps -listening to the dim echoes of the long passages and spacious corridors-damp, and gloomy, and cold-as he hears the tempest beating with fury against his window, and gazes at the curtains, dark, and heavy, and covered with mold-and when all the ghost-stories that ever were told come up before him-amid all his thick-coming fancies, whom does he think of? Washington Irving.

Go farther still: go to the Moorish fountains, sparkling full in the moonlight-go among the water-carriers and the village gossips living still as in days of old-and who has traveled among them before you, and peopled the Alhambra and made eloquent its shadows? Who awakes there a voice from every hill and in every cavern, and bids legends, which for centuries have slept a dreamless sleep, or watched unwinkingly, start up and pass before you in all their life and glory?

But leaving this again, who embarked with Columbus upon his gallant ship, traversed with him the dark and mighty ocean, leaped upon the

land and planted there the flag of Spain, but this same man, now sitting by my side? And being here at home again, who is a more fit companion for money-diggers? And what pen but his has made Rip Van Winkle, playing at nine-pins on that thundering afternoon, as much part and parcel of the Catskill Mountains as any tree or crag that they can boast?

But these are topics familiar from my boyhood, and which I am apt to pursue; and lest I should be tempted now to talk too long about them, I will, in conclusion, give you a sentiment, most appropriate, I am sure, in the presence of such writers as Bryant, Halleck, and-but I suppose I must not mention the ladies here-"The Literature of America." She well knows how to do honor to her own literature and to that of other lands, when she chooses Washington Irving for her representative in the country of Cervantes. [Applause.]

876

"THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE"

By James Russell Lowell

(Speech in response to a welcome home at the annual Ashfield Dinner at Ashfield, Mass., August 27, 1885-the harvest-time festival in behalf of Sanderson Academy. Mr. Lowell had recently returned from his post as Minister to England.)

MR. PRESIDENT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: I cannot easily escape from some strength of emotion in listening to the words of my friend who has just sat down, unless I receive it on the shield which has generally been my protection against many of the sorrows and some of the hardships of life. I mean the shield of humor, and I shall, therefore, take less seriously than playfully the portrait that he has been kind enough to draw of me. It reminds me of a story I once heard of a young poet, who published his volume of verses and prefixed to it his own portrait drawn by a friendly artist. The endeavor of his life from that time forward was to look like the portrait that his friend had drawn. [Applause.] I shall make the same endeavor.

It is a great pleasure to me to come here to-day, not only because I JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. Poet and essayist. Born at Cambridge, Mass., February 22, 1819, and died there August 12, 1891; graduated from Harvard in 1838; in 1855 became Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard; was for some time editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and the North American Review; in 1877 he was appointed United States Ambassador to Spain; Minister to Great Britain, 1880

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