country and its benefactors are objects of His care?

Adams and Jefferson, I have said, are no more. As human beings, indeed
they are no more. They are no more, as in 1776, bold and fearless
advocates of independence; no more, as on subsequent periods, the head
of the government; no more, as we have recently seen them, aged and
venerable objects of admiration and regard. They are no more. They are
dead. But how little is there of the great and good which can die! To
their country they yet live, and live forever. They live in all that
perpetuates the remembrance of men on earth; in the recorded proofs of
their own great actions, in the offspring of their intellect, in the
deep-engraved lines of public gratitude, and in the respect and homage
of mankind. They live in their example; and they live, emphatically,
and will live, in the influence which their lives and efforts, their
principles and opinion, now exercise, and will continue to exercise,
on the affairs of men, not only in their own country, but throughout
the civilized world. A superior and commanding human intellect, a truly
great man, when Heaven vouchsafes so rare a gift, is not a temporary
flame, burning bright for a while, and then expiring, giving place to
returning darkness. It is rather a spark of fervent heat, as well as
radiant light, with power to enkindle the common mass of human mind; so
that when it glimmers in its own decay, and finally goes out in death,
no night follows, but it leaves the world all light, all on fire,
from the potent contact of its own spirit. Bacon died; but the human
understanding roused by the touch of his miraculous wand to a perception
of the true philosophy and the just mode of inquiring after truth, has
kept on its course successfully and gloriously. Newton died; yet the
courses of the spheres are still known, and they yet move on in the
orbits which he saw, and described for them, in the infinity of space.

No two men now live, fellow-citizens, perhaps it may be doubted whether
any two men have ever lived in one age, who, more than those we now
commemorate, have impressed their own sentiments, in regard to politics
and government, on mankind, infused their own opinions more deeply into
the opinions of others, or given a more lasting direction to the current
of human thought. Their work doth not perish with them. The tree which
they assisted to plant will flourish, although they water it and protect
it no longer; for it h