be paid in advance to the Mount Vernon fund. Mr.
Everett also invited the readers of the " Ledger "
to transmit each the sum of fifty cents or more
toward the same object, and this appeal produced
more that $3,000. ' On 22 Dec, 1857, he delivered
an address on charity and charitable associations
for the benefit of the Boston provident association,
which was repeated fifteen times, with receipts of
about 113,500. On 17 Jan., 1859, he delivered an
address in Boston on the " Early Days of Franklin,"
which was repeated five times, yielding about
f 4,000 to various institutions. The receipts of
these lectures were not less than $90,000. A notice
of the " Life and Works of Daniel Webster," by
Mr. Everett, is included in the collective edition
of the works of the former (6 vols., Boston, 1852).
From his pen also came the "Life of General
Stark," in Sparks's "American Biography." and
several of the annual reports of the Massachusetts
board of education. At the instance of Lord Mac-
aiday, he contributed a life of Washington to the
" Encyclopaedia Britannica " (published separately,
New "York, 1860). Mr. Everett had substantial
claims to the character of a poet. His dirge of
" Alaric the Visigoth " and the beautiful poem of
"Santa Croce" are among the few compositions
that the remembrance of school-boy declamation
can present without fear of rebuke to the maturer
judgment of riper years. In addition to the " De-
fence of Christianity," already mentioned, and oc-
casional addresses, official letters, reports, etc.,
Mr. Everett published " Orations and Speeches
on Various Occasions " (Boston, 1830); " Impor-
tance of Practical Education and Useful Knowl-
edge," a selection from his " Orations and other
Discourses," published in 1836, originally prepared
for the Massachusetts district-school library at the
request of the Board of education (New York,
1817); "Orations and Speeches on Various Occa-
sions from 1826 to 1850" (2d ed., 2 vols., Boston,
1850; this edition includes all that were in the
edition of 1830; 3d ed., 2 vols., 1853). These
volumes contain eighty-one articles. The third
volume of Everett's " Orations and Speeches "
(Boston, 1859) contains forty-six articles, and also
a copious index to the contents of the three
volumes. Volume IV. of the " Orations and
Speeches " (Boston, 1859) contains fifty-nine arti-
cles. Those who would witness a remarkable illus-
tration of the power of eloquence to transfuse life
and beauty into the teachings of science, the les-
sons of history, the ethics of politics, and vicissi-
tudes of letters, will not neglect to devote their
" days and nights " to the orations of Edward Ev-
erett. The first oration that drew upon Mr. Ever-
ett the eyes of his countrymen at large was deliv-
ered at Cambridge before the Phi Beta Kappa
society, 27 Aug., 1824. The subject was, " The Cir-
cumstances Favorable to the Progress of Literature
in America." When the youthful orator had ex-
cited to a painful pitch the feelings of the vast
assemblage, he suddenly turned to the illustrious
guest, Lafayette, who had seen so much of the rise
and fall of human greatness, who had witnessed
alike the destruction of a throne and the birth of
a nation, and addressed him in an apostrophe never
to be forgotten by auditor or reader. Perhaps
Mr. Everett's powers as an orator are nowhere dis-
played to greater advantage than in that passage
in his Fourth of July address delivered at Dorches-
ter, Mass., in 1855, in which he epitomizes, in a
single eloquent paragraph, the far-reaching conse-
quences of the battle of Lexington. He said: " On
the 19th of April the all-important blow was struck;
the blow which severed the fated chain whose every
link was bolted by an act of parliament, whose
every rivet was closed up by an order in council —
which bound to the wake of Europe the brave bark
of our youthful fortune, destined henceforth and
forever to ride the waves alone — the blow which
severed that fated chain was struck. The blow was
struck which will be felt in its consequences to our-
selves and the family of nations till the seventh
seal is broken from the apocalyptic volume of the
history of empires. The consummation of four
centuries was completed. The life-long hopes and
heart-sick visions of Columbus, poorly fulfilled in
the subjugation of the plumed tribes of a few trop-
ical islands, and the partial survey of the conti-
nent; cruelly mocked by the fetters placed upon
his noble limbs by his own menial and which he
carried with him into his grave, were at length
more than fulfilled, when the new world of his dis-
covery put on the sovereign robes of her separate
national existence, and joined, for peace and for
war, the great Panathenaic procession of the na-
tions. The wrongs of generations were redressed.
The cup of humiliation drained to the dregs by the
old puritan confessors and nonconformist victims
of oppression — loathsome prisons, blasted fortunes,
lips forl)idden to open in prayer, earth and water
denied in their pleasant native land, the separations
and sorrows of exile, the sounding perils of the
ocean, the scented hedge-rows and vocal thickets of
the ' old countrie ' exchanged for a pathless wilder-
ness ringing with the war-whoop and gleaming
with the scalping-knife; the secular insolence of
colonial rule, checked by no periodical recurrence
to the public will; governors appointed on the
other side of the globe that knew not Joseph; the
patronizing disdain of undelegated power; the legal
contumely of foreign law, wanting the first element
of obligation, the consent of the governed expressed
by his authorized representative; and at length the
last unutterable and burning affront and shame, a
mercenary soldiery encamped upon the fair emi-
nences of our cities, ships of war with springs on
their cables moored in front of our crowded quays,
artillery planted open-mouthed in our principal
streets, at the doors of our houses of assembly, their
morning and evening salvos proclaiming to the ris-
ing and the setting sun that we are the subjects
and they the lords— all these hideous phantoms of
the long colonial night swept off by the first sharp
volley on Lexington Green." An eloquent review
of Mr. Everett's orations, l)y Prof. Cornelius C.
Felton, was published in the " North American
Review " for October, 1850, and an admirable an-
alysis of his mental characteristics and oratorical
style, by a distinguished critic, himself an orator
of renown, Geoi'ge S. Hillard, will be found in
the same periodical for January, 1837. We give
a brief extract from the latter: " The great charm
of Mr. Everett's orations consists not so much in
any single and strongly developed intellectual
trait as in that symmetry and finish which, on
every page, give "token to the richly endowed
and thorough scholar. The natural movements
of his mind are full of grace: and the most
indifferent sentence which falls from his pen has
that simple elegance which it is as difficult to de-
fine as it is easy to perceive. His level passages
are never tame, and his fine ones are never super-
fine. His style, with matchless flexibility, rises
and falls with his subject, and is alternately easy,
vivid, elevated, ornamented, or picturesque, adapt-
ing itself to the dominant mood of the mind,
as an instrument responds to the touch of a
master's hand. His knowledge is so extensive and
the field of his allusions so wide, that the most
Page:Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography (1900, volume 2).djvu/412
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.
388
EVERETT
EVERETT