But I must turn away from this sad affliction to us all,--it will be long before I shall turn my thought from it,--for the world is passing on; it will soon pass by my grave and the graves of us all. I do not wonder that this sweeping tide bears our thoughts much into the coming world,--mine, I sometimes think, too much. But we have to fight our battle, perform our duties, while one and another drops around us; and one of the things that engages me just now, is to prepare a discourse to be delivered under our Elm Tree on the 21st. The Elm Tree Association, before which the address just alluded to was made, was a Village Improvement Society, of which my father was [240] one of the founders, and which took its name from an immense tree, one of the finest in Massachusetts, standing near the house of his maternal grandfather. To smooth and adorn the ground around the Great Elm, and make it the scene of a yearly summer festival for the whole town, was the first object of the Society, extending afterwards to planting trees, grading walks, etc., through the whole neighborhood; and it was one of the earlier impulses to that refinement of taste which has made of Sheffield one of the prettiest villages in the country. With its fine avenue of elms, planted nearly forty years ago, its gardens and well-shaven turf, it shows what care and a prevailing love of beauty and order will do for a place where there is very little wealth. It was about this time that my father planted in an angle of the main street the Seven Pines, which now make, as it were, an evergreen chapel to his memory, and with the proceeds of some lectures that he gave in the town, set out a number of deciduous trees around the Academy, many of which are still living, though the building they were intended to shade is gone. The Elm Tree Association, however, from one cause and another, was short-lived; but "It lived to light a steadier flame" in the Laurel Hill Association, of Stockbridge, which, taking the idea from the Sheffield plan, continues to develop it in a very beautiful and admirable manner. [241] The address at the gathering in 1856 was chiefly occupied with a review of the history of the town, and with the thoughts appropriate to the place of meeting; and at the close the speaker took occasion to explain to his townspeople his ideas upon the national crisis of the day, and the changed aspect that had been given to the slavery question by the fresh determination of the South to maintain the excellence of the system and to force it upon the acceptance of the North in the new States then forming. Against this he made earnest and solemn protest, with a full expression of his opinion as to the innate wrong to the blacks, and the destructive effects on the whites, of slavery; but at the same time he spoke with large and kindly consideration for the Southerners. After doing justice to the care and kindness of many of them for their slaves, he said, in close:--