"Gentlemen and fellow citizens--It gives me transcendent happiness and unalloyed pleasure to lend my humble presence to this sublime and significant occasion, and I cannot permit this occasion to pass without availing myself of the opportunity that this magnificent and intelligent audience affords of presenting myself to you as the candidate for the democratic nomination for the office of representative in the Kentucky Legislature. It has been the pride of my life to proclaim myself as a patriot; that I am a descendent of one who helped to make this country free--'decori decus addit avoto,' and I have felt that the realization of this patriotism and its dream that has clung to me through life, would be in getting a system of locks and dams on the Kentucky river--that river that winds through an enchantment of rocky cliffs and hanging foliage; by mountains, cedar-tipped and mossy-green; by rolling meadows, where the velvet softness of the blue-grass enriches this idyllic picture--this stream that is famed in song and story, a perfect Switzerland of enrapturing and delicious beauty. Here a thundering waterfall and fragile foliage bending over the foam. Here cool and shady ravines leading up to tranquil Edens, the voluptuous bends through an enchantment of bloom and wildwood, losing themselves among the rock-ribbed hills. This stream, bathed in the effulgence of the dropping sun--the mingling afterglow of sunset and the primrose bloom of the first stars, unfolds then with its majestic splendors to the enraptured gaze. We are held spell-bound, my friends, as we see the bright moon riding the hilltops and shining overhead, "'The bright moon shining overhead, The stream beneath the breeze's touch, Are pure and perfect joys indeed, But few are they who think them such.'"