Elias Lyman Magoon

“ The magnitude of their great works, and boldness of execution, the vastness of design and mechanical skill, displayed in their existing monuments, compel us to admire the constructive talent of Rome, as Greece taught us to revere inventive genius. Unyielding energy and graceful elegance are brought into striking contrast. On the one hand, we behold the same iron greatness, indomitable will, and union of physical with moral vigor, combined with indifference to intellectual beauty, which bent alike the material and political world beneath the yoke of old Rome. ”

“ For grace, symmetry, and loveliness, we must look for the best models amongst that wonderful people who still remain in the great past, a centre of literary glory above all competition; from whose poets we derive our best ideas of the beautiful and sublime; from whose artists we copy the eternal rules of taste; and from whose orators we catch the high passions which most thrill the human breast. Such, in general terms, was the age when Pericles ruled in the first of cities, not by the degrading arms of mercenaries, but through the magical influence of genius and talent. ”

“ Fugitives from the smoldering ruins of Grecian glory, transported their gods through the flames, to establish a new worship in more favored climes. In the cause of mankind, apparent defeat has ever been positive victory; and all its triumphs have achieved increased benefits for all. When the hour is darkest, and the air most chill, then expect the first dawn on the edge of a sky that shall pour increased light upon all nations; the first lifting of a trumpet that with louder peals shall break up the sleep of the great tomb of destiny. ”

“ Thoughts so elaborated became never setting stars, to cheer the world, and point unerringly through the cycles of a corrupt taste to ideal excellence. As each growth, minute or majestic, was equally perfect of its kind, though differenced by peculiarity of form and tints, the whole was charmingly blended in that wreath of consummate beauty, which, in the age of Pericles, Greece hung round the constitution of the state, high on the central shrine of the most magnificent temple of her gods. ”

“ When Gothic night descended, the ancient classics were for a time forgotten; but in secluded retreats the ritual of genius continued to be solemnized, and the sacred fire of learning burned upon its shattered shrines, until torch after torch carried the flame to the remotest quarter in the track of the sun. That light never sets, but sheds itself upon succeeding generations in diversified hues of splendor. Homer glows in the softened beauty of Virgil, and Dantè passed the purified flambeau to Milton's mightier hand. Literature, like art, suffers fearful vicissitudes and mutilations ”

“ Let it here be added that the intervention of civil power, or arbitrary constraint in any form, so far from expediting human improvement, will retard it indefinitely. No reform is real and enduring, save as it is the fruit of profound persuasion. It works a change, not in the relations of things, but in the conditions of intelligence. Above the ruins of obsolete civilization, then, let us elevate the sacred flambeau of immortal truth so high, that it may shine upon all eyes, and diffuse its effulgence through the mists of error everywhere, to reclaim wanderers from their deceptive paths. ”

“ The great Father never formed the limbs of his children to be chafed with fetters, nor their faculties to wither in gloom. Action that is enforced regardless of freedom, is like the relation of a brute to the fierce rider upon his back, or the tingle of a lash to the skin of a slave. For all such, the lowliest as well as the loftiest, was vouchsafed the intellectual sun which illumines every man who comes into the world. It will never descend beneath the horizon, neither can any clouds long obscure it, but augment its effulgence rather. ”

“ Living, he did this, and dying, he looked beyond the grave but to a world of men, sublimated, indeed, but still with human passions, and capable of human enjoyments. He turned with fond desire toward the radiance of the descending sun, which with genial glories seemed wooing him to another and purer earth. The great ocean stream severed the world of debasing toil from the bright sphere of not less active but nobler pursuits, and on that western shore he anticipated fairer as well as more abundant fruits than the East might behold. ”

“ The burden of the notes was, human freedom; human brotherhood; human rights; the sovereignty of the people; the supremacy of law over will; the divine right of man to govern himself. The strain is still prolonged in vibrations of ever-widening circuit. That was an era of eras. Its influence, vitalized by the American Union, is fast becoming paramount throughout the civilized world. Europe feels it at this very moment to her utmost extremities, in every sense, in every fibre, in every pulsation of her convulsed and struggling energies. ”

“ The men of sacred functions whom our age and country demand, are those who hail the spirit of the times with joy, as the expanding soul of humanity, with its lightnings striking down the throne of tyranny and the altar of priestcraft. In fertilizing co-operation they waken arts and sciences, and bid them advance to bless the people, by erecting homes of comfort and culture amid prairies where the panther roamed, or on heights where the eagle propagated his glorious strength. ”

“ The mystical polemics which brought all learning to a low ebb at the epoch of the decline of ancient literature, long lurked faintly among the cloisters, by the dim lamp of dreaming solitaries, to whom true science was an unfathomable ocean, of which they vainly strove to sound the depths, while their only object should have been to sail across it. But their dogmatical fixedness was overruled for good, since all the great elements of speculative thought were thus conserved, and progressive philosophy, nevertheless, like its type and hero, through night and tempest westward took its course. ”

“ Our Union constitutes the final member of an association truly majestic and holy, the design of which is to elevate all classes and conditions of men to the utmost heights of wisdom and worth.
The nations are not destined to find a precarious calm in their degradation. They can never be subjugated by force, even should their volitions be chained for a season, while their sentiments are enervated in the service of the licentious. The great law of human progress will not long permit its apathetic subjects to be passive and mute spectators, impelled, like a vile horde, from one power to another. ”

“ She was of that old Greek temper that wreathed the skeleton with flowers, and to her might be applied the legend which testifies that the nightingales of sweetest song were those whose nests were built nearest to the tomb of Orpheus. The early lyrics of Greece were productions full of wonders. They glowed with the hues of that orient of their origin, and where all forms appear in purple glory; each flower beams like a morning ray fastened to earth, and eagle thoughts soar to the sun on golden wings. ”

“ Thenceforth North America became to all nations the land of the future. The fertility of its soil, and the favorableness of its position, the grandeur of its forms and the extent of its spaces, seem to have prepared it to become the abode of the vastest and most powerful association of men that ever existed. If the order of nature is a foreshadowing of that which is to be, certainly the physical aspects of this western world, as well as the historical facts which connect it with the East, are sublime intimations of the will of Providence. ”

“ As heterogeneous metals dissolve and amalgamate anew in the white heat of a furnace, so under the burning breath of colonial eloquence all the settlements of the Atlantic coast blended in the aspirations of one spirit, and contended for civil and religious freedom as a common boon. The great hero whose name it is one of the numerous glories of the present age to bear, was the visible destiny of his day, and invincible in his genius, like the new ideas of which he was the champion. ”

“ The commencement of literature was not a scheme contrived to win the savage to civilization: it was the wild and spontaneous outburst of religious enthusiasm. If powerful institutions are always ascribed to distinguished men only, it is simply because that the full light of common thoughts is never condensed and vividly set forth but by that exalted order of genius which is the rarest of gifts. Minds of the finest tone express the most comprehensive doctrines, as the lyre of Orpheus, and the pipe of Silenus, sung how heaven and earth rose out of chaos. ”

“ When Christianity was to be given to the world, the Roman empire had received that form of government which most fully combined enterprise with solidity; the daring energy of a Republic, with the comprehensive ambition of a monarchy. Like all the great leaders of mankind, the genius of the Cæsars might stand for the representative of the empire. The unequaled union of the bold, the sagacious, and the indomitable, rendered that wonderful series of instruments superlatively adapted to cast up a highway, and gather out the stones from the path of human progress. ”

“ In the growth of a flower there is continued development, visibly marked by successive mutations, but indivisibly connected from beginning to end. Simultaneous with complete maturity glows the instant of consummate bloom, the highest point of fullness, fragrance, and fascination. That splendid culmination in the progressive refinement which adorned and made fruitful the garden of Greece, was signalized by the faultless forms and transparent language left us by Sophocles. The lucid beauty of his works was the chosen mirror of Athens, to reflect internal harmony, and the greatest beauty of soul. ”

“ To us, we will own, nothing is so interesting and delightful as to contemplate the steps by which the England of the Domesday Book—the England of the Curfew and the Forest Laws—the England of crusaders, monks, schoolmen, astrologers, serfs, outlaws—became the England which we know and love—the classic ground of liberty and philosophy, the school of all knowledge, the mart of all trade. ”

“ We may often be called to contemplate the struggling of brave heroes, but they are never altogether overcome by their pangs. The strongest emotions do not repel the spectator, but attract him rather; as in the dying Gladiator, or tortured Laocoon. While the misery we contemplate pierces to the very soul, it yet inspires us with a wish that we could endure with a fortitude like that we see. Beauty was latent in Periclean Greeks, like fire in crystal, which, however brilliant when excited, habitually rests in quiet, and robs not its abode of either purity or strength. ”

“ Pisistratus, Cimon, Aristides, and Pericles, were of noble birth; but Themistocles was the first, and, except Demosthenes, the greatest of those who rose from the humblest ranks, but none the less ennobled himself, while he elevated the common fortunes in his own ascent. His genius alone was the architect of all his grandeur, and drew from Diodorus the exclamation, "What other man could, in the same time, have placed Greece at the head of nations, Athens at the head of Greece, himself at the head of Athens? In the most illustrious age the most illustrious man." ”

“ As the botanic gardens, at that time planted in the new Italian universities, were fragrant with a thousand exotics, unknown to antiquity, so the softest fabrics, and most delicious fruits, recalled to memory the concurrent events of Providence, which for a long time made Venice and Genoa the emporia of mediæval traffic. Every luxury of the old world, which commerce converted into a comfort for the new, is a memento of the discoveries which guided navigation in the remotest seas, and carried European adventurers so far as to make the treasures of the entire globe our own. ”

“ The history of modern Europe must necessarily be referred to Florence, as the history of all-conquering force has ever been ascribed to Rome. The great ascendancy of the Medici, and the influence of Italian genius at that epoch on literature, art, science, philosophy, and religion of the world, made that fair city the centre of light, the sovereign of thought, the beautifier of life, and the metropolis of civilization. The fall of old Rome and the rise of new Italy, were events as desirable as they were inevitable. ”

“ Every year finds us a new stadium in advance; but it is only at great culminating eras that civilization seems to become aware of the actual speed of its reformatory motion. Victory always remains with the new spirit, and freedom, like truth, never can become old; they are in God, and thereby the final battle and widest conquest must eventually be secured. Not one great campaign was ever lost to humanity, nor ever will be. Every historical nation bears in its bosom the germs of more prolific and ennobling fruits, which their successors will employ to subdue and adorn hardier and richer fields. ”

“ Many Christians died the death of martyrs in those western wilds, and their ashes thrown to the winds, became the seed-corn of a new world. Innumerable heroes arose who were actuated by a profound faith—not of abstract reason, but of deep sentiment; the secret and source of an inspiration not to be cast aside, but which filled the soul, absorbed its faculties, and formed the chief aim of its existence. From the fifth century, Europe became a perpetually enlarged field for Christianity, but not its boundary. ”