liberty perhaps, or word of succor to the oppressed, of exhortations to
duty, to patriotism, to glory, the refutation of a sophism, the unfolding
of a truth for which the nation may be better,--how soon a word fitly or
wisely spoken here is read on the Upper Mississippi and beneath the
orange-groves of Florida, all through the unequalled valley; how vast an
audience it gains, into how many bosoms it has access, on how much good
soil the seed may rest and spring to life, how easily and fast the fine
spirit of truth and beauty goes all abroad upon the face of the world.

There is an influence which I would rather see Massachusetts exert on her
sisters of this Union, than see her furnish a President every twelve years
or command a majority on any division in Congress; and that is such an
influence as Athens exerted on the taste and opinion first of Greece, then
of Rome, then of the universal modern world; such as she will exert while
the race of man exists. This, of all the kinds of empire, was most grateful
and innocent and glorious and immortal. This was won by no bargain, by no
fraud, by no war of the Peloponnesus, by the shedding of no human blood. It
would rest on admiration of the beautiful, the good, the true, in art, in
poetry, in thought; and it would last while the emotions, its object, were
left in a human soul. It would turn the eye of America hitherwards with
love, gratitude and tears, such as those with which we turn to the walk of
Socrates beneath the plane-tree, now sere, the summer hour of Cicero, the
prison into which philosophy descended to console the spirit of Boethius,--
that room through whose opened window came into the ear of Scott, as he
died, the murmur of the gentle Tweed,--love, gratitude, and tears, such as
we all yield to those whose immortal wisdom, whose divine verse, whose
eloquence of heaven, whose scenes of many-colored life, have held up the
show of things to the insatiate desires of the mind, have taught us how to
live and how to die! Herein were power, herein were influence, herein were
security. Even in the madness of civil war it might survive for refuge and