It was a people thus schooled to the love and attainments and championship of freedom—its season of infant helplessness now long past, the strength and generosity and fire of a mighty youth, moving its limbs, and burning in its eye— a people, whose bright spirit had been fed midst the crowned heights, with hope and liberty and thoughts of power— this was the people whom our Revolution summoned to the grandest destiny in the history of nations. They were summoned, and a choice put before them: slavery, with present ease and rest and enjoyment, but all inglorious— the death of the nation’s soul; and liberty, with battle and bloodshed, but the spring of all national good, of art, of plenty, of genius. Liberty born of the skies! breathing of all their odors, and radiant with all their hues! They were bidden to choose, and they chose wisely and greatly. They linked their hands—they pledged their stainless faith In the dread presence of attesting Heaven— They bound their hearts to sufferings and death With the severe and solemn transport given To bless such vows. How man had striven, How man might strive, and vainly strive they knew, And called upon their God. They knelt, and rose in strength. I have no need to tell you the story of the Revolution, if the occasion were to justify it. Some of you shared in its strife; for to that, as to every other great duty, Ipswich was more than equal. Some who have not yet tasted of death, some perhaps even now here, and others who have followed or who went before their illustrious La Fayette. All of you partake of its fruits. All of you are encompassed about by its glory! But now that our service of commemoration is ended, let us go hence and meditate on all that it has taught us. You see how long the holy and beautiful city of our liberty and our power has been in building, and by how many hands, and at what cost. You see the towering and steadfast height to which it has gone up, and how its turrets and spires gleam in the rising and setting sun. You stand among the graves of some—your townsmen, your fathers by blood, whose names you bear, whose portraits hang up in your homes, of whose memory you are justly proud—who helped in their day to sink those walls deep in their beds, where neither frost 23 76 - tfMSl
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