Fellow-citizens, I will detain you no longer by this faint and feeble tribute to the memory of the illustrious dead.  Even in other hands, adequate justice could not be done to them, within the limits of this occasion.  Their highest, their best praise, is your deep conviction of their merits, your affectionate gratitude for their labors and their services.  It is not my voice, it is this cessation of ordinary pursuits, this arresting of all attention, these solemn ceremonies, and this crowded house, which speak their eulogy.  Their fame, indeed, is safe.  That is now treasured up beyond the reach of accident.  Although no sculptured marble should rise to their memory, nor engraved stone bear record of their deeds, yet will their remembrance be as lasting as the land they honored.  Marble columns may, indeed, moulder into dust, time may erase all impress from the crumbling stone, but their fame remains; for with AMERICAN LIBERTY it rose, and with AMERICAN LIBERTY ONLY can it perish.  It was the last swelling peal of yonder choir, “THEIR BODIES ARE BURIED IN PEACE, BUT THEIR NAME LIVETH EVERMORE.”  I catch that solemn song, I echo that lofty strain of funeral triumph, “THEIR NAME LIVETH EVERMORE.”

Of the illustrious signers of the Declaration of Independence there now remains only CHARLES CARROLL.  He seems an aged oak, standing alone on the plain, which time has spared a little longer after all its contemporaries have been levelled with the dust.  Venerable object! we delight to gather round its trunk, while yet it stands, and to dwell beneath its shadow.  Sole survivor of an assembly of as great men as the world has witnessed, in a transaction one of the most important that history records, what thoughts, what interesting reflections, must fill his elevated and devout soul!  If he dwell on the past, how touching its recollections; if he survey the present, how happy, how joyous, how full of the fruition of that hope which his ardent patriotism indulged; if he glance at the future, how does the prospect of his country’s advancement almost bewilder his weakened conception!  Fortunate, distinguished patriot!  Interesting relic of the past!  Let him know that, while we honor the dead, we do not forget the living; and that there is not a heart here which does not fervently pray that Heaven may keep him yet back from the society of his companions.

And now, fellow-citizens, let us not retire from this occasion without a deep and solemn conviction of the duties which have devolved upon us.  This lovely land, this glorious liberty, these benign institutions, the dear purchase of our fathers, are ours; ours to enjoy, ours to preserve, ours to transmit.  Generations past and generations to come hold us responsible for this sacred trust.  Our fathers, from behind, admonish us, with their anxious paternal voices; posterity calls out to us, from the bosom of the future; the world turns hither its solicitous eyes; all, all conjure us to act wisely, and faithfully, in the relation which