anity. "'Gainst
death and all oblivious enmity, shall you pace forth," beloved Master.
As long as our English language lasts men's hearts will be cheered and
their souls strengthened and liberated by the noble and musical pages
with which you have enriched it.

[1] An Address delivered at the Centenary of the Birth of Ralph Waldo
Emerson in Concord, May 25, 1903, and printed in the published
proceedings of that meeting.

III

ROBERT GOULD SHAW[1]

Your Excellency, your Honor, Soldiers, and Friends: In these unveiling
exercises the duty falls to me of expressing in simple words some of
the feelings which have actuated the givers of St. Gaudens' noble work
of bronze, and of briefly recalling the history of Robert Shaw and of
his regiment to the memory of this possibly too forgetful generation.

The men who do brave deeds are usually unconscious of their
picturesqueness. For two nights previous to the assault upon Fort
Wagner, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment had been afoot, making
forced marches in the rain; and on the day of the battle the men had
had no food since early morning. As they lay there in the evening
twilight, hungry and wet, against the cold sands of Morris Island, with
the sea-fog drifting over them, their eyes fixed on the huge bulk of
the fortress looming darkly three-quarters of a mile ahead against the
sky, and their hearts beating in expectation of the word that was to
bring them to their feet and launch them on their desperate charge,
neither officers nor men could have been in any holiday mood of
contemplation. Many and different must have been the thoughts that
came and went in them during that hour of bodeful reverie; but however
free the flights of fancy of some of them may have been, it is
improbable that any one who lay there had so wild and whirling an
imagination as to foresee in prophetic vision this morning of a future
May, when we, the people of a richer and more splendid Boston, with
mayor and governor, and troops from other States, and every
circumstance of ceremony, should meet together to celebrate their
conduct on that evening, and do their memory this conspicuous honor.

How, indeed, comes it that out of all the great engagements of the war,
engagements in many of which the troops of Massachusetts had borne the
most distinguished part, this officer, only a young colonel, this
regiment of black men and its maiden battle,--a battle, moreover, which
was lost,