The commonplace question:  “How is the weather going to be?” gives a boundless play to the imagination, and makes a man a poet before he knows it.  And then a poet must have grand subjects in nature.  And what does a poet want that he does not find in New England?  Wooded glens, mysterious ravines, inaccessible summits, hurrying rivers; the White Hills, keeping up, as Starr King said, “a perpetual peak against the sky”; the Old Man of the Mountains looking down the valley of the Pemigewasset, and hearing from afar the Ammonoosuc as it breaks into a hundred cataracts; Katahdin, Kearsarge, setting its back up higher than ever since that little affair off Cherbourg; the everlasting ocean inviting to adventure, inspiring to its own wild freedom, and making a harbor in every front yard, so that the hardy mariner can have his smack at his own doorstep. [Laughter.] (Need I say I mean his fishing-smack?) What more can a poet desire?

And then life in New England, especially New England of the olden time, has been an epic poem.  It was a struggle against obstacles and enemies, and a triumph over nature in behalf of human welfare.

What would a poet sing about, I wonder, who lived on the Kankakee Flats?  Of course, the epic poet must have a hero, and an enemy, and a war.  The great enemy in those parts is shakes; so, as Virgil began, “I sing of arms and the man,” the Kankakee poet would open: 

  “I sing the glories of cinchona and the man
  Who first invented calomel.”

Yes, if the Pilgrims had landed upon the far Western prairies or the Southern savannas, they would never have made America; they would never have won a glory beyond that of Columbus, who only discovered America, whereas these men created it. [Applause.]

But not a place alone.  New England is also a race; the race that plants colonies and makes nations; the race that carries everywhere a free press, a free pulpit, an open Bible, and that has almost learned to spell and parse its own language; the race which began the battle for civil and religious liberty in the time of Elizabeth, which fought the good fight at Edgehill, which, beside Concord Bridge, “fired the shot heard round the world,” which made a continent secure for liberty at Appomattox. [Applause.]

And New England is not alone a place and a race; it is as well an idea, or a congeries of ideas, so closely joined as properly to be called but one; and this idea is not the idea of force, but the force of ideas.

But, gentlemen, I am in danger of forgetting that a marked characteristic of New Englanders is an unwillingness to talk, and especially to talk about themselves.  And I know that you are eager to listen to the illustrious men whom we have the honor to gather about our humble board this evening.

* * * * *

CAUSES OF UNPOPULARITY