We need not trace our own history through each of these periods. The incipient stages have all been ours, although, in consequence of a more healthy and vigorous maternity, we have passed through them with a rapidity of which the previous annals of the world present no examples. Less than a century has elapsed since that birth, whose festive natal day is presented in the calendar of the present month, and yet we are already approaching the season of manhood. We have passed that proud period which never comes but once in a nation's life, although it may be succeeded by others far surpassing it in what may be esteemed the more substantial elements of national wealth and national prosperity. Almost every state has had its HEROIC AGE. We too have had ours, and we may justly boast of it as one equaling in interest and grandeur any similar period in the annals of Greece and Rome--as one which would not shrink from a comparison with the chivalrous youth of any of the nations of modern Europe. It is the unselfish age, or rather, the time when the self-consciousness, both individual and national, is lost in some strong and all-absorbing emotion--when a strange elevation of feeling and dignity of action are imparted to human nature, and men act from motives which seem unnatural and incredible to the more calculating and selfish temperaments of succeeding times. It is a period which seems designed by Providence, not for itself only, or the great effects of which it is the immediate cause, but for its influence upon the whole after-current of the national existence. The strong remembrance of it becomes a part of the national life; it enters into its most common and constant thinking, gives a peculiar direction to its feeling; it imparts a peculiar character to its subsequent action; it makes its whole historical being very different from what it would have been had there been no such epic commencement, no such superhuman or _heroic birth_. It furnishes a treasury of glorious reminiscences wherewith to reinvigorate from time to time the national virtue when impaired, as it ever is, by the factious, and selfish, and unheroic temper produced by subsequent days of merely economical or utilitarian prosperity.