“O Beautiful! my Country! ours once more! ... What words divine of lover or of poet Could tell our love and make thee know it, Among the Nations bright beyond compare? What were our lives without thee? What all our lives to save thee? We reck not what we gave thee; We will not dare to doubt thee, But ask whatever else, and we will dare!” Lowell, “Commemoration Ode.” ADDRESS AT THE DEDICATION OF THE SOLDIERS’ MONUMENT IN CONCORD In 1836, the “Battle Monument” to commemorate “the First organized Resistance to British Aggression” had been erected “in Gratitude to God and Love of Freedom” on “the spot where the first of the Enemy fell in the War which gave Independence to the United States.” Thirty-three years later, on the Nineteenth day of April, with its threefold patriotic memories for Concord,[K] the people gathered on the village common to see their new memorial to valor. The inscription on one of its bronze tablets declared that THE TOWN OF CONCORD BUILDS THIS MONUMENT IN HONOR OF THE BRAVE MEN WHOSE NAMES IT BEARS: AND RECORDS WITH GRATEFUL PRIDE THAT THEY FOUND HERE A BIRTHPLACE, HOME OR GRAVE. The inscription on the other tablet is the single sentence,— THEY DIED FOR THEIR COUNTRY IN THE WAR OF THE REBELLION with the forty-four names. Hon. John S. Keyes as President of the Day opened the ceremonies with a short address. The Rev. Grindall Reynolds made the prayer. An Ode written by Mr. George B. Bartlett was sung to the tune of _Auld Lang Syne_. Hon. Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, the Chairman of the Monument Committee, read the Report, in itself an eloquent and moving speech. This was followed by Mr. Emerson’s Address. Mr. F. B. Sanborn contributed a Poem, and afterwards short speeches were made by Senator George S. Boutwell, William Schouler, the efficient Adjutant-General of the State, and by Colonels Parker and Marsh respectively of the Thirty-second and Forty-seventh regiments of Massachusetts Volunteers, in which the Concord companies had served. The exercises were concluded by the reading of a poem by Mr. Sampson Mason, an aged citizen of the town. It was a beautiful spring day. The throng was too large for the town hall, so, partly sheltered from the afternoon sun by the town elm, thickening with its brown buds, they gathered around the town-house steps, which served as platform for the speakers. [181] _Page 351, note 1._ Compare, in the _Poems_, the lines in “The Problem” on the adoption by Nature of man’s devotional structures. [182] _Page 352, note 1._