We cannot honor our country with too deep a reverence; we cannot love her with an affection too pure and fervent; we cannot serve her with an energy of purpose or a faithfulness of zeal too steadfast and ardent. And what is our country? It is not the East, with her hills and her valleys, with her countless sails and the rocky ramparts of her shores. It is not the North, with her thousand villages, and her harvest-home, with her frontiers of the lake and the ocean. It is not the West, with her forrest-sea and her inland-isles, with her luxuriant expanses, clothed in the verdant corn, with her beautiful Ohio and her majestic Missouri. Nor is it yet the South, opulent in the mimic snow of the cotton, in the rich plantations of the rustling cane, and in the golden robes of the rice-field. What are these but the sister families of one greater, better, holier family,--our country? I come not here to speak the dialect, or to give the counsels of the patriot-statesman. But I come, a patriot scholar, to vindicate the rights and to plead for the interests of American Literature. And be assured, that we cannot, as patriot-scholars, think too highly of that country, or sacrifice too much for her. And let us never forget, let us rather remember with a religious awe,--that the union of these States is indispensable to our literature, as it is to our national independence and civil liberties,--to our prosperity, happiness, and improvement. If, indeed, we desire to behold a literature like that which has sculptured with so much energy of expression, which has painted so faithfully and vividly, the crimes, the vices, the follies of ancient and modern Europe;--if we desire that our land should furnish for the orator and the novelist, for the painter and the poet, age after age, the wild and romantic scenery of war; the glittering march of armies, and the revelry of the camp; the shrieks and blasphemies, and all the horrors of the battle-field; the desolation of the harvest, and the burning cottage; the storm, the sack, and the ruin of cities;--if we desire to unchain the furious passions of jealousy and selfishness, of hatred, revenge, and ambition, those lions that now sleep harmless in their den;--if we desire that the lake, the river, the ocean, should blush with the blood of brothers; that the winds should waft from the land to the sea, from the sea to the land, the roar and the smoke of battle, that the very mountain-tops should become altars for the sacrifice of brothers;--if we desire that these, and such as these,--the elements, to an incredible extent, of the literature of the Old World,--should be the elements of our literature; then, but then only, let us hurl from its pedestal the majestic statue of our Union, and scatter its fragments over all our land.