in the abstract feeling, and becomes too elevated or too refined to glow with fervor in the commendation or the love of individual benefactors.  All this is unnatural.  It is as if one should be so enthusiastic a lover of poetry as to care nothing for Homer or Milton; so passionately attached to eloquence as to be indifferent to Tully[21] and Chatham; or such a devotee to the art, in such an ecstasy with the elements of beauty, proportion, and expression, as to regard the masterpieces of Raphael and Michel Angelo with coldness or contempt.  We may be assured, Gentlemen, that he who really loves the thing itself, loves its finest exhibitions.  A true friend of his country loves her friends and benefactors, and thinks it no degradation to commend and commemorate them.  The voluntary outpouring of the public feeling, made to-day, from the north to the south, and from the east to the west, proves this sentiment to be both just and natural.  In the cities and in the villages, in the public temples and in the family circles, among all ages and sexes, gladdened voices to-day bespeak grateful hearts and a freshened recollection of the virtues of the Father of his Country.  And it will be so, in all time to come, so long as public virtue is itself an object of regard.  The ingenuous youth of America will hold up to themselves the bright model of Washington’s example, and study to be what they behold; they will contemplate his character till all its virtues spread out and display themselves to their delighted vision; as the earliest astronomers, the shepherds on the plains of Babylon, gazed at the stars till they saw them form into clusters and constellations, overpowering at length the eyes of the beholders with the united blaze of a thousand lights.

A Wonderful Age and Country

Gentlemen, we are at a point of a century from the birth of Washington; and what a century it has been!  During its course, the human mind has seemed to proceed with a sort of geometric velocity, accomplishing for human intelligence and human freedom more than had been done in fives or tens of centuries preceding.  Washington stands at the commencement of a new era, as well as at the head of the New World.  A century from the birth of Washington has changed the world.  The country of Washington has been the theater on which a great part of that change has been wrought, and Washington himself a principal agent by which it has been accomplished.  His age and his country are equally full of wonders; and of both he is the chief.

If the poetical prediction, uttered a few years before his birth, be true; if indeed it be designed by Providence that the grandest exhibition of human character and human affairs shall be made in this theater of the Western world; if it be true that,

  “The four first acts already past,
  A fifth shall close the drama with the day;
  Time’s noblest offspring is the last”;

how could this imposing, swelling, final scene be appropriately opened, how could its intense interest be adequately sustained but by the introduction of just such a character as our Washington?