The New England Town: Its Spirit and Meaning With Some Reference to Modern Social and Economic Questions (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The New England Town: Its Spirit and Meaning With Some Reference to Modern Social and Economic Questions

But as we, responding to your gladly heard call, stand here among our native hills, whose sweet airs we first breathed and whose bird songs were the first we knew, amid the scenes where life was shaped and its first inspirations drawn, among our own dear people and near the many graves of others once and yet our own, our eyes and our hearts go searching for the faces that smiled on us long years ago, and we realize how many of them are dust; how many of those who made the past for us of that day have gone on to the great communion of saints. On this day dedicate to the historic memories of our dear home, our hearts go out with tender yearnings to those who made it home to us, who here made our joys, helped our hopes, smoothed our diffi culties, and shared our griefs; who made and kept here in simple truth and steadfastness those institutions of religion, learning, and freedom under equal law which give to life all its due Opportunities to work out for itself its divine significance and intent. And our recollecting love takes account of those of our mother's many sons whose graves in earth and sea are not with us; who heard their call for life elsewhere, andsleep where their night fell; some after the full ness of days in the good works of peace, well wrought; some who dared meet death on stricken fields for freedom and for country, for truth and righteousness' sake. How many are the names each heart recalls, how tender and how proud are the memories that enshrine them, how prayerful the love that clings to and follows them. May the blessed light perpetual shine on them. Whether they were to us father or mother, brother or sister, lover or friend, we who meet to take a reverent, thankful, backward look over a cen tury's rounded tale of years, greet each other in loving consciousness of them, drawn to them as they still, please God, to us, by the cords of a man by that deathless affection which binds unbrokenly the life that was and the life that is, to the life which, for us, is to come, and which for them has already dawned. And so we stand with them to-day, an unsundered host, before the God of our fathers in all their generations, while we recount what He hath wrought here where true and brave men and tender and patient women have toiled and spared not in His name; one with them in that deep and mystical, personal sense of which historic association and continuity are but phases and necessary incidents.

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