ten of his religion. I often wonder
that, in computing the cause of his rigorous manners, so inadequate
account is wont to be made of his situation, as in a principal and
long-continuing aspect substantially military--which it was. The truth
is, his physiognomy was primarily the soldier stamp on him.

If you had been at Gettysburg on the morning of July 2, 1863, as I was,
and had perused the countenance of the First and Eleventh Corps,
exhausted and bleeding with the previous day's losing battle, and the
countenance of the Second, Third, and Twelfth Corps, getting into
position to meet the next onset, which everybody knew was immediately
impending, you would have said that it was a sombre community--that Army
of the Potomac--with a good deal of grimness in the face of it; with a
notable lack of the playful element, and no fiddling or other fine arts
to speak of.

As sure as you live, gentlemen, that is no unfair representation of how
it was with the founders of the New England commonwealths in their
planting period.

The Puritan of the seventeenth century lived, moved, and had his being
on the field of an undecided struggle for existence--the New England
Puritan most emphatically so. He was under arms in body much of the
time--in mind all the time. Nothing can be truer than to say that. And
yet people everlastingly pick and poke at him for being stern-featured
and deficient in the softer graces of life.

It was his beauty that he was so, for it grew out of and was befitting
his circumstances. And I, for one, love to see that austere demeanor so
far as it is yet hereditary on the old soil--and some of it is
left--thinking of its origin. It is the signature of a fighting far more
than of an ascetic ancestry--memorial of a new Pass of Thermopylae held
by the latest race of Spartans on the shores of a new world. [Applause.]

It may be doubted if ever in the history of mankind was displayed a
quality of public courage--of pure, indomitable pluck--surpassing that
of the New England plantations in their infant day. No condition of its
extremest proof was lacking. While the Bay Colony, for example, was in
the pinch of its first wrestle with Nature for a living, much as ever
able to furnish its table with a piece of bread--with the hunger-wolf
never far away from the door, and behind that wolf the Narragansett and
the Pequot, at what moment to burst into savagery none could tell--in
the season when mere existence was the pu