Evening times-Republican. [volume] (Marshalltown, Iowa) 1890-1923, 1909-05-31
MEMORIAL DAY 1909.

They hover as an invisible army
above the nation -Beecher.
The buds and the blossoms are but
pledges of springtime to autumn; only
a promise that may be redeemed, or,
Cancelled by untoward frosts, may fail
of redemption. The springing plant
that thrusts its tiny spear of living
verdure toward the sun is but hope
to be justified by season and circum-
stance. When men count their store
they count the full corn in the ear, the
ripe sheaves harvested, the perfect fruit
gathered and the grain golden in gran
aries. Today men measure the full corn
in the ear and the promise of spring
fulfilled.
No life that has ripened to the ma
turity which marks its time of reap
ing is lost. The fulness of life culn-
mates when it has fulfilled its mission
and droops to the universal sickle The
good and great and true and trust
worthy live longest after the change we
call death. The splendor of noble life
grows luminous, a pillar of fire where
by the footsteps of the weak and wand
erng may be guided And SO today when
we tell the rosary of our losses we
count our greatest gains. We are not
as Rachael mourning for her children
and wailing that they are not, for
these have been, and are and forever
shall be. If any have tears let them be
drid for life that is justified by achieve
ment is immortal If there be voices
that mourn let them be stilled; foI
those who have fought for the rights
If all men, who have been part and
parcel of the purposes of God are in
tegers of the universe. They can not
be lost nor their accomplishment I'M
done.
Untold centuries ago an unknown
man walked in the plastic sands that
shelved to the waters of a forgotten
river. He died. The ages lapsed past
as the waves passed unheeded in the
night. Earthquakes jumbled the hills
together and changed the face of the
globe. Forests grew and fell and de-
cayed and new forests succeeded them
others. Races vanished. The Mound
builder came and built his hecatombs
and passed on into oblivion. Still the
ages lapsed and life sprung into being,
smiled and loved and warred and sor-
rowed and faded like the light of a
summer day. And the test and might
est race, blasting the ancient and i'm
penetrable rocks in search of material
upon which it might blazon immutably
the story of its own achievement, tore
away the massy curtain of the ages
and gazed in awesome wonderment
upon the footprints made that day in
the morning of the world when a saw
age walked abroad in the sunrise of
the ages on the sands Of a river that
had ceased to run and whose shores
had hardened into granite. There they
stood, the evidence of life, untouched
by earthquake, safe from the tooth of
time, the record of a man and his ac-
ton.
From the lakes to the gulf, from out
every northern valley and off every
northern hillside to the Georgian sea-
coast; from Maine past Antietam and
thru the Wilderness to the deltas, lie
immortal trails thick with the immut-
able footsteps of the men who exalted
liberty and died for the rights of man
in the righteous quarrel of all the CEN
turtles past and all the ages to come.
They are not dead. They hover as an
invisible army above this nation"