and felt in the profoundest recesses of the heart, and
carried out into the general life, and made the foundation of practical
usefulness, and visible beauty, and true nobility.

Liberty, with them, was an object of too serious desire and stern resolve
to be personified, allegorized, and enshrined. They made no goddess of it,
as the ancients did; they had no time nor inclination for such trifling;
they felt that liberty was the simple birthright of every human creature;
they called it so; they claimed it as such; they reverenced and held it
fast as the unalienable gift of the Creator, which was not to be
surrendered to power, nor sold for wages.

It was theirs, as men; without it, they did not esteem themselves men;
more than any other privilege or possession, it was essential to their
happiness, for it was essential to their original nature; and therefore
they preferred it above wealth, and ease, and country; and, that they
might enjoy and exercise it fully, they forsook houses, and lands, and
kindred, their homes, their native soil, and their fathers' graves.

They left all these; they left England, which, whatever it might have been
called, was not to them a land of freedom; they launched forth on the
pathless ocean, the wide, fathomless ocean, soiled not by the earth
beneath, and bounded, all round and above, only by heaven; and it seemed
to them like that better and sublimer freedom, which their country knew
not, but of which they had the conception and image in their hearts; and,
after a toilsome and painful voyage, they came to a hard and wintry coast,
unfruitful and desolate, but unguarded and boundless; its calm silence
interrupted not the ascent of their prayers; it had no eyes to watch, no
ears to hearken, no tongues to report of them; here, again, there was an
answer to their soul's desire, and they were satisfied, and gave thanks;
they saw that they were free, and the desert smiled.

I am telling an old tale; but it is one which must be told when we speak
of those men. It is to be added, that they transmitted their principles to
their children, and that, peopled by such a race, our country was always
free. So long as its inhabitants were unmolested by the mother country in
the exercise of their important rights, they submitted to the form of
English government; but when those rights were invaded, they spurned even
the form away.

This act was the Revolution, which came of course and spontaneously, and