Memorialist

“ As your Memorialists sufferings have been very long and great—They humbly ask as many Favours and Indulgences as to your Excellency shall appear anyways reasonable and fit, and as in duty bound they will ever pray etc. ”

“ Your Memorialist is likewise under the necessity of entreating, and she now does in the most humble manner, entreats that the Legislature of the United States would also take her necessitous circumstances into their wise consideration, and make some provision for the subsistence of herself and her children, in order that she may have some alleviation of her accumulated load of human woe.
as in Duty bound shall ever pray
Concord, December 9th 791
This certifies that I believe the facts stated in the above Memorial are true. ”

“ The witness Adams, who deponed that he had a better view of the man in the house than Lambie, stated at the trial that he, standing at the threshold, saw the man’s face as he approached, that their eyes met, and that the man walked slowly towards him, face to face, but Adams would not go further than to say that Slater resembled the man very much. He is superior to Lambie and Barrowman in years, education and intelligence. Your Memorialist begs to emphasise the fact that this witness had a much better view of the man than any of the other witnesses. ”

“ His Majesty's Government have considered the memorial of the seven with the greatest care. His Majesty's Government fully appreciate the reasons why the memorialists desire to retain their anonymity, and the fact that the memorial is anonymous has not in any way detracted from the importance which His Majesty's Government attribute to the document.
The areas mentioned in the memorandum fall into four categories : —
1. ”

“ By adopting a policy and platform in harmony with what your Memorialists have ventured to suggest, you will, we believe, give joy to many affectionate receivers of our doctrines, bring increased strength and honor to your body, and greatly advance the interests of the Cause we are jointly seeking to promote. ”

“ Each of those names in the table is the memorial—perhaps the only memorial—of a human heart that once lived and loved; a heart that kept its steady pulsations through some certain period of time, and then ceased to beat and mouldered into dust. Each of those names is the memorial of an individual human life that had its joys and sorrows, its cares and burthens, its affections and hopes, its conflicts and achievements, its opportunities wasted or improved, and its hour of death. ”

“ Years passed. City and cemetery were each grown vaster. It was again an afternoon when the people strolled among the graves and monuments. An old man had courteously attached himself to a group that stood around a crumbling memorial. He had reached a great age; but his figure was erect, his face animated by strong emotions, and his eyes burned beneath his brows.
"Sirs," said he, interposing in the conversation, which turned wholly on the monument, "you say nothing of him in whose honour it was erected."
"We say nothing because we know nothing." ”

“ Now, if it were a fact that a hundred thousand newly sharpened swords might suffice to overcome our enemies, we, your Memorialists, by no means devoid of natural feelings of patriotism, would welcome the day when these foreigners might once for all be smitten hip and thigh. But if such a result can by no means be achieved under existing conditions, then it is not we who deserve the name of traitors, but those Ministers who, by their errors, have led the State to the brink of disaster. ”

“ We keep Memorial Day.
They are sleeping in the valleys, they are sleeping neath the sea,
They are sleeping by the thousands till the royal reveille;
Let us know them, let us name them, let us honor one and all. ”

“ As to that hour with backward steps I turn,
Midway I pause; behold a funeral urn!
Ah, sad memorial! known but all too well
The tale which thus its golden letters tell:
This dust, once breathing, changed its joyous life
For toil and hunger, wounds and mortal strife;
Love, friendship, learning's all prevailing charms,
For the cold bivouac and the clash of arms.
The cause of freedom won, a race enslaved
Called back to manhood, and a nation saved,
These sons of Harvard, falling ere their prime,
Leave their proud memory to the coming time. ”

“ If we commemorate, let us commemorate by a memorial which arrests and attracts the eye, is long and gratefully remembered, and by an inscription which touches the heart, and does not merely merge a man among the possessors of all human gifts and virtues. ”

“ She sees the dying look, the parting tear,
That sought with anxious tenderness to save
That dear memorial from the closing grave:
He clasps the object of his love's last care,
And vows for him the load of life to bear; 130
To rear the blossom of a faded flower,
And bid remembrance sooth each ling'ring hour.
He journey'd o'er a dreary length of way,
To plains where freedom shed her hallow'd ray ”

“ In your Memorialists’ humble opinion they are hardly sufficient to fulfil the objects of the Congress. The educational work is greatly hampered owing to want of funds. Your Memorialists, therefore, venture to submit that the danger which the present Bill is intended to guard against does not exist at all. ”

“ In these sweet solitudes the morning passes quickly, and in the afternoon we go to the cemetery, which is about three miles from the town, to witness the decoration of the soldiers’ graves—for it is Memorial Day—the one day set apart in every year now and for all time for people to come to do honour to the dead who fell in the lost cause; nay, for the dead who fell on either side. Streams of people crowd the highways and byways, all flowing in one direction, and all mass together at the wide-open gates of the cemetery. ”

“ A similar feeling of pride at the completion of a great career is expressed in the memorial lines which he composed to be placed under his bust after death,—“Let no one weep for me, or celebrate my funeral with mourning; for I still live, as I pass to and fro through the mouths of men.” ”

“ What I hope we shall do is to take careful thought where our memorials shall be set, so that they may be most constantly and plainly seen; and then how they may best fulfil their purpose, which is to remind us first, and next to kindle emotion and imagination. We have an ugly habit of combining, if we can, local utility with a memorial, as in the well-known story of the benevolent clergyman who read out the announcement of the death of a great statesman and added, ‘That is just what we wanted! ”

“ Memorial Day The finest tribute we can pay Unto our hero dead to-day, Is not a rose wreath, white and red, In memory of the blood they shed; It is to stand beside each mound, Each couch of consecrated ground, And pledge ourselves as warriors true Unto the work they died to do. ”

“ And shall we not thank God that we were given the strength and means to make this memorial to him, and to know that as long as time shall last the grief of the women who loved him, there portrayed, shall follow him, and the glory, which the false enemy shall wrest from him, shall fold him forever to her breast, while the light of the Divine patience of his sacrifice of self shall shine ever round and about him, and more and more shall illumine our path from the dark mysteries here of pain and death to the heaven where we shall know the reason of it all! ”

“ The halo which around you shines
Shall, as the years go by.
Add luster to the deeds which in
Our memories fondly lie.
We deck your graves with flowers today,
O comrades brave and true!
In token of the love we bear,
Our offerings round we strew. ”

“ Thou unknown hero sleeping by the sea
In thy forgotten grave—with secret shame
I feel my pulses beat, my forehead burn,
When I remember thou hast given for me
All that thou hast, thy life, thy very name. ”

“ Years they had marked for the joys of the brave,
Years they must waste in the sloth of the grave.
All the bright laurels that promised to bloom
Fell to the earth when they went to the tomb.
Give them the meed they have won in the past;
Give them the honors their merits forecast;
Give them the chaplets they won in the strife;
Give them the laurels they lost with their life.
Cover them over—yes, cover them over—
Parent and husband and brother and lover;
Crown in your heart these dead heroes of ours,
And cover them over with beautiful flowers! ”

“ What we may desire is that the memorial, whatever it is, of this great and heroic trial through which we are passing, should grow up out of the minds of the inhabitants of a city or a town, and should be made by the hands of inhabitants as well. ”

“ But when outward danger had been safely passed, and nothing but a feeling of perfect security could naturally be realized, the object of this memorial became sensibly alive to the impressiveness of the solemn sentiment of our Church’s funeral service—“In the midst of life we are in death!” ”

“ As we look upon America's public memorials, we also remember the unseen tributes that dwell in homes and hearts across the country-the personal mementos and memories treasured by mothers who have lost a child in military service. ”

“ On Memorial Day we honor the final resting places of the more than one million men and women who sacrificed their lives for our Nation, by decorating their graves with the stars and stripes, as generations have done since 1868. ”

“ Beloved by the Army, honoured by his Sovereign, and respected by his country, he has terminated a life devoted to her service by a glorious death, leaving his name as a memorial, an example, and an excitement to those who shall follow him in the path of honour, and it is from his country alone that his memory can receive the tribute which is its due. ”

“ In presenting the impressive memorial to the United States, I said:
Six hundred survivors of the war which ended forty years ago, the commander-in-chief of the National Guard of Pennsylvania and his military staff, the major general commanding that Guard and his three brigadier generals have come a distance of one thousand miles to dedicate a memorial. What is its significance? “What mean ye by these stones?” It is true of nations, as it is of men, that they may rise on stepping stones of their dead selves to higher things. But the pathway is ever attended by indescribable sufferings. ”

“ Spring, with her sunshine and showers, has lifted the wintry mantle from Mother Earth and bid the buds and blossoms come forth in all their fragrance and beauty to fill the outstretched hands of the Union veterans, who, with their sweet spirit of fraternity, will place them above the last resting places of their comrades-in-arms that sleep in the City of Peace—whose boundaries extend from ocean to ocean, from the mountains to the gulf. With tenderness in our hearts let us remember those who sleep where no loving hands can bear them a garland of memory. ”

“ He blesses you every day. Look around—you, too, have got your tokens set up as a memorial unto you for ever. Look at your houses, they are memorials to you of what God has brought you into. Look at your children, every one of them is a little mark-stone or memorial of God's goodness to you. Look at your health, your good strong arms. ”

“ As the world swings through the constellations year after year, I want the memory, I want the patriotic memory of this country to sit by the grave of every Union soldier, and, while her eyes are filled with tears, to crown him again and again with the crown of everlasting honor. ”

“ Let us stand ready with willing hearts and hands to render the comrades every assistance that they may require of us on Memorial Day — whether it be to weave the laurel and the pine into chaplets for our heroes dead or to make glad the day for our heroes living—let all be done quietly as befits a day hallowed by tender associations. ”

“ And beautiful exceedingly are those beloved memorials—the silken locks of childhood, the treasured tresses of riper years, or the silver gray of reverend old age—which, in the eyes of sorrowing friends, are the dearest [7] relics of the loved ones whose angel spirits beyond the tomb have passed through death into eternity.
“There seems a love in hair, though it be dead:
It is the gentlest, yet the strongest thread
Of our frail plant—a blossom from the tree
Surviving the proud trunk; as if it said,
Patience and Gentleness in Power. ”

“ For around and within these memorials lingers the life of Humanity; they speak to the eye as well as to memory,—to the heart as well as the intelligence; they draw us by human associations to the otherwise but technical statement; they lure us to repeople solitudes and reanimate shadows ”

“ It may be true that we mount on our dead selves to higher things, but it is well to hold little Memorial Days now and then, and on the graves of our dead, especially [251] of those who died young in the flower of innocence, to leave a peppermint, as the soldiers leave on the grave of Miss Emily a print flag and a basket of geraniums. A cemetery need not be a mournful place. ”

“ Such monuments are cenotaphs indeed; founded far away from the true body of the fame of the hero; who, if he be truly a hero, must still be linked with the living interests of his race; for the true fame is something free, easy, social, and companionable. They are but tomb-stones, that commemorate his death, but celebrate not his life. ”

“ Every mountain and hill shall have its treasured name, every river shall keep some solemn title, every valley and every lake shall cherish its honored register; and till the mountains are worn out and the rivers forget to flow, till the clouds are weary of replenishing springs and the springs forget to gush and the rills to sing, shall their names be kept fresh with reverent honors which are inscribed upon the book of National Remembrance. ”