The Vermont watchman. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1883-1911, 1890-07-02
"The Glorious Fourth.v


Our old holiday, "the glorious
FOURTH" has changed its character
somewhat, and is now day of recrea-
ton rather than of patriotic reminis-
cence and exhortation. Doubtless in
old Boston there were those who
thought that the 9Th of March, the day
of the massacre in King Cor State)
street in ITO, would be always as
piously observed by patriotic Boston as
when DR.. Warren and John Hancock
delivered the grafton. But the observ-
ance ended, Mr.. Palfrey tells us, in
1888; and in 1885, perhaps with the
same relief that the nobleman regarded
the death of an author, because he
could then bind him up and place
him on the library shelf, thirteen 9TH
of March orations were bound up, and
the celebration of the famous day was
also laid upon the shelf.
No such decline will be apprehended
for the Fourth of July, and as for bind
lug up the orations upon that day
The old character of the holiday will
revive upon occasion, however, and a
! great orator will always give it dis
! tinction by pointing a present moral.
! There is no more noted Fourth of July
Grafton in all the long list than that of
! Charles Sumner in Boston in lS45. His
theme was the true grandeurof nations,
which he declared to be peace, and on
the anniversary of the triumphant ma
tional independence resulting from
great war, and in the presence of the
military forces of the commonwealth,
the discourse was a powerful philippe
| anainet II a mr. hln
ton, thoroughly characteristic of the
man, which really disclosed him to the
| public, and perhaps to himself. But
nothing could have more signally illus
trated the orators want of quick sense
of humor.
There were two other later and no.
table Boston Fourth of July orations.
In 1858 Rufus Choate, in his most fer
vent and characteristic vein, and flood
of that poetic rhetoric in which he is
wholly unsurpassed among American
orators, delivered plea for the Union
in the old conservative sense; and Ed
ward Everett, about year before the
war, recounted our greatness and dep
recated the inevitable. Both orators
were the pensive poets of a vanished
America. Closing his brilliant survey,
and insisting that our condition in 1858
assured our health, our strength and
our future-as indeed they did, but not
as the orator urmised-Cboate said,
but with anxious eXultaton, Just as
the great civic storm was about to
break: "This shadow that fits across
our grasses and is gone, this shallow
ripple that darkens the surface of our
broad and widening stream and passes
away, this little perturbation which our
telescopes can not find, and which our
science can hardly find, but which we
know can not change the course or
hasten the doom of one star have
these any terrors for us?'
These are voices of Fourth of July
that is gone. 1t was not fitting
shadow nor shallow ripple that the
orator saw. But the tempest which
they portended has purified the air,
and the Fourth of July eloquence of
this year may happily devote itself to
service which was then hopeless, be-
cause the conditions of its success did
not exist-the service of weaving an
ever closer tie of national union. The
words of Choate, which when spoken
were profoundly painful and unreal
from their vivid contrast with the ter
rible fact, we can repeat to-day with the
Joy of assured anticipation. Happy,
if such day shall not be desecrated by
our service; happy, if for us that de-
loving, wore elevated, more united
America. George William Curtis, IN
Hdrper'S Magazine.