advantage of me in the tenderest point; you give me no chance of
playing at company, or holding you at a distance, but flock about
me like a host of brothers, and make this place like home. Indeed,
gentlemen, indeed, if it be natural and allowable for each of us,
on his own hearth, to express his thoughts in the most homely
fashion, and to appear in his plainest garb, I have a fair claim
upon you to let me do so to-night, for you have made my home an
Aladdin's Palace. You fold so tenderly within your breasts that
common household lamp in which my feeble fire is all enshrined, and
at which my flickering torch is lighted up, that straight my
household gods take wing, and are transported there. And whereas
it is written of that fairy structure that it never moved without
two shocks--one when it rose, and one when it settled down--I can
say of mine that, however sharp a tug it took to pluck it from its
native ground, it struck at once an easy, and a deep and lasting
root into this soil; and loved it as its own. I can say more of
it, and say with truth, that long before it moved, or had a chance
of moving, its master--perhaps from some secret sympathy between
its timbers, and a certain stately tree that has its being
hereabout, and spreads its broad branches far and wide--dreamed by
day and night, for years, of setting foot upon this shore, and
breathing this pure air. And, trust me, gentlemen, that, if I had
wandered here, unknowing and unknown, I would--if I know my own
heart--have come with all my sympathies clustering as richly about
this land and people--with all my sense of justice as keenly alive
to their high claims on every man who loves God's image--with all
my energies as fully bent on judging for myself, and speaking out,
and telling in my sphere the truth, as I do now, when you rain down
your welcomes on my head.