Lexington gazette. [volume] (Lexington, Va.) 1871-1962, 1906-06-20
OLD KENTUCKY HOME
Henry Watterson Pays Eloquent
Tribute to Virginia

Tribute to Virginia
Last Wednesday was observed in
Louisville as Kentucky's Home
Coming reunion. Colonel Henry
Watterson, the venerable and dis
tinguished editor Of the Louisville
Courier-Jt urnal, delivered the ad-
of welcome, in the course of which
he Daid glowing tributes to Vir-
GINA. Among other things Colo
mel Watterson said:
Kentucky! Old Kentucky! The
very name has had charm, has
wrought spell. has made a music,
all its own; has woven on its syl-
van loom glory quite apart from
the glory of Virginia, Ksntucky's
rother,and the glory OF Tennessee,
Kentucky's sister. 1t he's bloomed
in all hearts where manhood and
womanhood hold the right of way.
The drama of the ages, told in
pulse-b beats, finds here an interlude
which fiction vainly emulates and
history may not o'erleap. Not as
the Greek, seeking Promethean
fire and oracles of Delphos, nor as
the Roman filled with the Joy of
living and the lust of conquest;
nor as the Viking, sprirging to
the call of wind and wave, nor as
the Latin, dazzled by the glitter
of gold, mad with the thirst for
glory; neither as the Briton and
the Teuton, eager for mastership
on land and sea, the Kentuckian,
whom We, in filial homage, salute
prcgenitor. He was as none of
these. Big in bone and strong of
voice-the full grown man pre-
figured by the psalmist-never the
ocean mirrored his fancies, nor
snoY-clad peaks that reach the
skies inspired, but the mystery of
the strange lands, the savagery of
nature and the Song of the green
wood tree.
The star that shone above him
and led him on was love of liberty,
tho beacon of his dreams, the
light of the fireside. He cut a
clearing In the wildwood and call
ed it home. He read not romance,
he made it; nor poetry, he lived it.
His the forests epic, the iliad of
the canebrake, the odyssey of the
frontier, the unconscious prose
poem Of the rife and the camp,
the blockhouse and the glow, the
Holy Bible and the old field school.
Happy the man who has sat in
childhood upon well-loved grand
sire's knee, awed by the telling Of
the wondrous tale; how even as
the Dardane followed Aeneas, the
.Virginians followed Boone; the
route from Troy to Tiber not
wearier, nor fanked by greater
hazard, than that betwixt the |
shores of the Chesapeake and the
Falls Of the Ohio; the mountains
standing, gorgon-like, across the
painless way, and il, denfending
each defile, TO hold inviolste some
dread, forbidden secret; the weird
wastes of wilderness beyond; the !
fordless stream. the yawl Ing
chasm; the CLEAN of the tOma-
hawk and the hiss Of the serpent;
yet ever onward. spite of the
haunting voice of the elements,
stripped for the death struggle
with nan, spite of the silence and
the solitude of reluctant nature,
like some fawn-eyed maiden, re-
sisting his rude intrusion; ever
onward, before him the promised
land of the hunters vision; in his
soul the grace of God, the fear of
he'll and the love of Virginia.
God bless Virginia Heaven
smile upon her as she prepares to
celebrate with fitting rite three
centuries of majestic achievement,
ii star crown upon her brow, the
distaf in her hand, nor spot nor
blur to dim the radiance of her
shield
They came, the VirginiaDs, in
their home spun in quest of homes;
their warrant, their rifles; their
payment, the blood of heroes; nor
yet forgetting proverb the
Chinese have that sit needs
hundred men to make fortress,
but only a woman can make a
home"--for they were quick to go
back for their women, their wives
and their sweethearts; our grand.
mothers, who stood by their side,
beautiful and dauntless, TO load
their fowling-pieces, to dress their
wounds. to cheer them on to bat
tie, singing their simple requiem
over the dead at, Boonesborough
and bringing water from the
spring at Bryan Station, heart
broke. only when the news came
back from the river Raisin.