are now teeming with population, and prosperous in all the great concerns of life; in good governments, the means of subsistence, and social happiness.  It may be safely asserted, that there are now more than a million of people, descendants of New England ancestry, living, free and happy, in regions which scarce sixty years ago were tracts of unpenetrated forest.  Nor do rivers, or mountains, or seas resist the progress of industry and enterprise.  Erelong, the sons of the Pilgrims will be on the shores of the Pacific.[12] The imagination hardly keeps pace with the progress of population, improvement, and civilization.

It is now five-and-forty years since the growth and rising glory of America were portrayed in the English Parliament, with inimitable beauty, by the most consummate orator of modern times.  Going back somewhat more than half a century, and describing our progress as foreseen from that point by his amiable friend Lord Bathurst, then living, he spoke of the wonderful progress which America had made during the period of a single human life.  There is no American heart, I imagine, that does not glow, both with conscious, patriotic pride, and admiration for one of the happiest efforts of eloquence, so often as the vision of “that little speck, scarce visible in the mass of national interest, a small seminal principle, rather than a formed body,” and the progress of its astonishing development and growth, are recalled to the recollection.  But a stronger feeling might be produced, if we were able to take up this prophetic description where he left it, and, placing ourselves at the point of time in which he was speaking, to set forth with equal felicity the subsequent progress of the country.  There is yet among the living a most distinguished and venerable name, a descendant of the Pilgrims; one who has been attended through life by a great and fortunate genius; a man illustrious by his own great merits, and favored of Heaven in the long continuation of his years.[13] The time when the English orator was thus speaking of America preceded but by a few days the actual opening of the revolutionary drama at Lexington.  He to whom I have alluded, then at the age of forty, was among the most zealous and able defenders of the violated rights of his country.  He seemed already to have filled a full measure of public service, and attained an honorable fame.  The moment was full of difficulty and danger, and big with events of immeasurable importance.  The country was on the very brink of a civil war, of which no man could foretell the duration or the result.  Something more than a courageous hope, or characteristic ardor, would have been necessary to impress the glorious prospect on his belief, if, at that moment, before the sound of the first shock of actual war had reached his ears, some attendant spirit had opened to him the vision of the future;—­if it had said to him, “The blow is struck, and America is severed from England for ever!”—­if