I felt the duty to help them in their first establishment here.  For this I had to work, having no means of my own.

Some generous friends advised me to try a lecture for this purpose, and I did it.  I will not act the part of crying complainants about our misfortunes; we will bear them.  Let me at once go to my task.

* * * * *

There is a stirring vitality of busy life about this your city of New York, striking with astonishment the stranger’s mind.  How great is the progress of Humanity!  Its steps are counted by centuries, and yet while countless millions stand almost at the same point where they stood, and some even have declined since America first emerged out of an unexplored darkness which had covered her for thousands of years, like the gem in the sea; while it is but yesterday a few pilgrims landed on the wild coast of Plymouth, flying from causeless oppression, seeking but for a place of refuge and of rest, and for a free spot in the wilderness to adore the Almighty in their own way; still, in such a brief time, shorter than the recorded genealogy of the noble horse of the wandering Arab; yes, almost within the turn of the hand, out of the unknown wilderness a mighty empire arose, broad as an ocean, solid as a mountain-rock, and upon the scarcely rotted roots of the primitive forest, proud cities stand, teeming with boundless life, growing like the prairie’s grass in spring, advancing like the steam-engine, baffling time and distance like the telegraph, and spreading the pulsation of their life-tide to the remotest parts of the world; and in those cities and on that broad land a nation, free as the mountain air, independent as the soaring eagle, active as nature, and powerful as the giant strength of millions of freemen.

How wonderful!  What a present—­and what a future yet!

Future?—­then let me stop at this mysterious word—­the veil of unrevealed eternity!

The shadow of that dark word passed across my mind, and amid the bustle of this gigantic bee-hive, there I stood with meditation alone.

And the spirit of the immovable Past rose before my eyes, unfolding the misty picture-rolls of vanished greatness, and of the fragility of human things.

And among their dissolving views, there I saw the scorched soil of Africa, and upon that soil Thebes with its hundred gates, more splendid than the most splendid of all the existing cities of the world; Thebes, the pride of old Egypt, the first metropolis of arts and sciences, and the mysterious cradle of so many doctrines which still rule mankind in different shapes, though it has long forgotten their source.  There I saw Syria with its hundred cities, every city a nation, and every nation with an empire’s might.  Baalbec, with its gigantic temples, the very ruins of which baffle the imagination of man, as they stand like mountains of carved rocks in the desert where for hundreds of miles not a stone is to be found,