nd Chatham; or such a devotee to the arts, in such
an ecstasy with the elements of beauty, proportion, and expression, as
to regard the masterpieces of Raphael and Michael Angelo with coldness
or contempt. We may be assured, Gentlemen, that he who really loves the
thing itself, loves its finest exhibitions. A true friend of his country
loves her friends and benefactors, and thinks it no degradation to
commend and commemorate them. The voluntary outpouring of the public
feeling, made to-day, from the North to the South, and from the East to
the West, proves this sentiment to be both just and natural. In the
cities and in the villages, in the public temples and in the family
circles, among all ages and sexes, gladdened voices to-day bespeak
grateful hearts and a freshened recollection of the virtues of the
Father of his Country. And it will be so, in all time to come, so long
as public virtue is itself an object of regard. The ingenuous youth of
America will hold up to themselves the bright model of Washington's
example, and study to be what they behold; they will contemplate his
character till all its virtues spread out and display themselves to
their delighted vision; as the earliest astronomers, the shepherds on
the plains of Babylon, gazed at the stars till they saw them form into
clusters and constellations, overpowering at length the eyes of the
beholders with the united blaze of a thousand lights.

Gentlemen, we are at a point of a century from the birth of Washington;
and what a century it has been! During its course, the human mind has
seemed to proceed with a sort of geometric velocity, accomplishing for
human intelligence and human freedom more than had been done in fives or
tens of centuries preceding. Washington stands at the commencement of a
new era, as well as at the head of the New World. A century from the
birth of Washington has changed the world. The country of Washington has
been the theatre on which a great part of that change has been wrought,
and Washington himself a principal agent by which it has been
accomplished. His age and his country are equally full of wonders; and
of both he is the chief.

If the poetical prediction, uttered a few years before his birth, be
true; if indeed it be designed by Providence that the grandest
exhibition of human character and human affairs shall be made on this
theatre of the Western world; if it be true that,

"The four first acts already past,
A fift