opening its boundless territories to the adventure and enterprise of the British people, and destined, to all human appearances, to be one day counted among the brightest jewels in the crowns of the British princes. Why is it not now seen sparkling in that which encircles her own brow?

If we might imagine the youthful Victoria, led along by the train of reflections which we have thus suggested, and snatching a moment from the anxious contemplation of colonies which she is in immediate danger of losing, to search after those which have been lost to her already, if we might imagine her turning back the page of History to the period of the first Stuart, to discover what became of the Virginia of Elizabeth after her death, how it was finally planted, and how it passed from beneath the sceptre of her successors, if we might be indulged in a far less natural imagination, and fancy ourselves admitted at this moment to the royal presence, and, with something more even than the ordinary boldness of Yankee curiosity, peering over the royal shoulder, as, impatient at the remembrance of losses sustained, and still more so at the prospect of like losses impending, she hurries over the leaves on which the fortunes of that Virginia are recorded, and the fortunes of all other Virginias foreshadowed, what a scene should we find unfolding itself to her view!

She sees, at a glance, a permanent settlement effected there, and James the First, more fortunate than his mother's murderer, inscribing a name not on a mere empty territory only, but on an organized and inhabited town. A page onward, she perceives a second and entirely separate settlement accomplished in a widely distant quarter of the continent, and the cherished title of NEW ENGLAND is now presented to her view. Around these two original footholds of civilization, she sees a hardy, enterprising, and chivalrous people rapidly clustering, while other settlements are simultaneously established along the territory which divides them. Thousands of miles of coast, with their parallel ranges of interior country, are soon seen thickly studded over with populous and flourishing plantations. The population of them all, which had run up from 0 to 300,000 by the close of the seventeenth century, is found advanced to more

than two millions by the close of the eighteenth. And another page displays to her kindling gaze thirteen as noble colonies as the sun ever shone upon, with nearly three millions of inhabitants, all acknowledging their allegiance to the British Crown, all contributing their unmatched energies to the support and extension of British commerce, and all claiming, as their most valued birthright, the liberties and immunities of the British Constitution. Ah! did the volume but end there! But she perceives, as she proceeds, that in a rash hour those liberties and immunities were denied them. Resistance, War, Independence, in letters of blood, now start up bewilderingly to her sight. And where the Virginia of Elizabeth was, two centuries and a third ago, a waste and howling wilderness upon which civilized man was as yet unable to maintain himself a moment, she next beholds an independent and united Nation of sixteen millions of freemen, with a commerce second only to her own, and with a country, a constitution, an entire condition of men and things, which from all previous experience in the growth of nations, ought to have been the fruit of at least a thousand years, and would have been regarded as the thrifty produce of a Millennium well employed!

Gentlemen of the New England Society and Fellow-Citizens of New York, of this wonderful rise and progress of our country, from the merely nominal and embryo existence which it had acquired at the dawn of the seventeenth century, to the mature growth, the substantial prosperity, the independent greatness and national grandeur in which it is now beheld, we this day commemorate a main, original spring. The twenty-second of December, 1620, was not the mere birthday of a town or a colony. Had it depended for its distinction upon events like these, it would have long ago ceased to be memorable. The town which it saw planted, is indeed still in existence, standing on the very site which the Pilgrims selected, and containing within its limits an honest, industrious, and virtuous people, not unworthy of the precious scenes and hallowed associations to whose enjoyment they have succeeded. But possessing, as it did originally, no peculiar advantages, either of soil, locality, or

climate, and outstripped, as it naturally has been, in wealth, size, population, and importance, by thousands of other towns all over the continent, it would scarcely suffice to perpetuate beyond its own immediate precincts, the observance, or even the remembrance of a day, of whose doings it constituted the only monument; while the colony of whose establishment that day was also the commencement, has long since ceased to enjoy any separate political existence. As if to rescue its founders from the undeserved fortune of being only associated in the memory of posterity with the settlers of individual States, and to insure for them a name and a praise in all quarters of the country, the Colony of New Plymouth never reached the dignity of independent sovereignty to which almost all its sister colonies were destined, and is now known only as the fraction of a county of a Commonwealth which was founded by other hands.

Yes, the event which occurred two hundred and nineteen years ago yesterday, was of wider import than the confines of New Plymouth. The area of New England, greater than that of Old England, has yet proved far too contracted to comprehend all its influences. They have been coextensive with our country. They have pervaded our continent. They have passed the Isthmus. They have climbed the farthest Andes. They have crossed the ocean. The seeds of the Mayflower, wafted by the winds of Heaven, or borne in the Eagle's beak, have been scattered far and wide over the Old World as well as over the New. The suns of France or Italy have not scorched them. The frosts of Russia have not nipped them. The fogs of Germany have not blighted them. They have sprung up in every latitude, and borne fruit, some twenty, some fifty, and some an hundred fold. And though so often struck down and crushed beneath the iron tread of arbitrary power, they are still ineradicably imbedded in every soil, and their leaves are still destined to be for the healing of all nations. O, could only some one of the pious fathers, whose wanderings were this day brought to an end, be permitted to enter once more upon these earthly scenes; could he, like the pious father of ancient Rome, guided by some guardian spirit and covered with a cloud, be conducted, I care not to what spot beneath the sky, how might he exclaim,

as he gazed, not with tears of anguish, but of rapture, not on some empty picture of Pilgrim sorrows and Pilgrim struggles, but upon the living realities of Pilgrim influence and Pilgrim achievement" Quis locus - Quæ regio- What place, what region upon earth is there, which is not full of the products of our labors! Where, where has not some darkness been enlightened, some oppression alleviated, some yoke broken or chain loosened, some better views of God's worship or man's duty, of divine law or human rights, been imparted by our principles or inspired by our example!"

This country, Fellow-Citizens, has in no respect more entirely contravened all previous experience in human affairs, than in affording materials for the minutest details in the history of its earliest ages. I should rather say, of its earliest days, for it has had no ages, and days have done for it what ages have been demanded for elsewhere. But whatever the periods of its existence may be termed, they are all historical periods. Its whole birth, growth, being, are before us. We are not compelled to resort to cunningly devised fables to account either for its origin or advancement. We can trace back the current of its career to the very rock from which it first gushed.

Yet how like a fable does it seem, how even "stranger than fiction," to speak of the event which we this day commemorate, as having exerted any material influence on the destinies of our country, much more as having in any degree affected the existing condition of the world! This ever-memorable, ever-glorious landing of the Pilgrims, how, where, by what numbers, under what circumstances, was it made? From what invincible Armada did the Fathers of New England disembark? With what array of disciplined armies did they line the shore? Warned by the fate which had so frequently befallen other colonists on the same coast, what batteries did they bring to defend them from the incursions of a merciless foe; what stores to preserve them from the invasions of a not more merciful famine?

In the whole history of colonization, ancient or modern, no feebler company either in point of numbers, armament, or supplies, can be found, than that which landed, on the day we commemorate, on these American shores. Forty-one men, — of

whom two, at least, came over only in the capacity of servants to others, and who manifested their title to be counted among the Fathers of New England within a few weeks after their arrival, by fighting with sword and dagger the first duel which stands recorded on the annals of the New World, for which they were adjudged to be tied together neck and heels and so to lie for four-and-twenty hours without meat or drink; - forty-one men, of whom one more, at least, had been shuffled into the ship's company at London, nobody knew by whom, and who even more signally vindicated his claim, no long time after, to be enumerated among this pious Pilgrim band, by committing the first murder and gracing the first gallows of which there is any memorial in our colonial history;- forty-one men, all told,— with about sixty women and children, one of whom had been born during the passage, and another in the harbor before they landed, — in a single ship, of only one hundred and eighty tons burden, whose upper works had proved so leaky, and whose middle beam had been so bowed and wracked by the cross winds and fierce storms which they encountered during the first half of the voyage, that but for "a great iron screw" which one of the passengers had brought with him from Holland, and by which they were enabled to raise the beam into its place again, they must have turned back in despair, conducted, after a four months' passage upon the ocean, either by the ignorance or the treachery of their pilot, to a coast widely different from that which they had themselves selected, and entirely out of the jurisdiction of the corporation from which they had obtained their charter;-and landing at last,—after a four weeks' search along the shore for a harbor in which they could land at all,— at one moment wearied out with wading above their knees in the icy surf, at another tired with travelling up and down the steep hills and valleys covered with snow, at a third, dashed upon the breakers in a foundering shallop whose sails, masts, rudder, had been successively carried away in a squall, with the spray of the sea frozen on them until their clothes looked as if they were glazed and felt like coats of iron, and having in all their search seen little else but graves, and received no other welcome but a shout of savages and a shower of arrows;