Slavery -- United States; United States -- Politics and government -- 1861-1865; United States -- Race relations
The foregoing is made up from the Plymouth oration. Webster was too near
to discern all the intellectual and moral advancement and the opulent
future promise of his own community, the proper fruit of the conditions
just summarized.[79] Let us indicate by only such a paucity of examples as
we have room for. Able and fully furnished lawyers everywhere. Think of
Story, a most diligently attending judge and one of the best; also
finding time both to be the first law professor and most fertile and
eminent author of the age, exhausting English and American sources and
authority in his books, and crowding them with a civil law learning to be
surpassed only by that of the Roman jurists of Germany; let Ticknor, whom
we may call the founder of the post classical school of literature in our
country, suggest the students of modern languages who followed in an
illustrious line,--let him suggest also the famous historians, such as
Prescott, Bancroft, Hildreth, Motley, Parkman, really representatives of
the school just mentioned, using methods that got into the American air
first from Ticknor; let Channing suggest the pulpit,--Channing, who raised
religion from the gloom of dogma and orthodoxy into a life of angelic joy;
what can one say to describe Emerson in a breath,--the teacher to us all
of fit aspiration, right thinking, noble expression, the highest virtue
and truest religion, and who lived, as Dr. Heber Newton has lately told,
the most perfect of lives as a man; Hawthorne, showing the world sick with
its yearning for moral redemption that even a disgraced, lone, and
friendless woman can by a subsequent life of unreserved confession,
purity, and love to her neighbors turn a horrible brand of guilt into a
jewel more precious and brilliant than diamond,--how his consummate
achievement rebukes the sixty years' dilatoriness of Goethe over his
unfinished Faust; and divine poets, Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, and
Holmes,--the last two conspicuous in letters, Lowell being in my judgment
the greatest American man of letters; I have said nothing of the statesmen
and orators, beginning with Fisher Ames and John Adams,--and there are
others in every high round of the intellectual life known all over the
land whose names I must omit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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