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- for years has been the least demonstrative of bodies.
As at the outset, it intermeddled not with political parties, and
refrained, among other things, from agitating for augmenting pensions,
its members long content with the poor pittance the new government with
difficulty at last provided; so throughout it has never deviated from
its one main principle, the priestly one of keeping alive the sacred
fire of patriotism.
If the Society of the Cincinnati, a heritage from the Fathers, be really
worthy of a respect bordering upon reverence, it is of the sort that the
Catholics pay to the bones of the saints; for, indeed, this venerable
institution survives but as a relic.
It seems amid the bustle of another age like the Greek monolith, the
Fire Column so called, in Constantinople, which unconsumed by the
repeated conflagrations of that capital, and rising from among all sorts
of lesser erections, attests a temper and an era that shall never be
restored. It is a remarkable monument of the times when the British
colonist in the spirit of John Hampden resisting the imposition of the
tea-tax, and indirectly the Crown, developed in the process of time into
a generation less impatient of imposts; pushing no quarrel, indeed,
against fiscal arbitrariness, or any sort of power so it be but plural
and domestic, wears a hat like the rest of us, and is careful to put on
that same humble deference toward the People, which all kings and
emperors scrupulously profess for Him Whom--with exemplary meekness
ignoring themselves--they officially denominate the Supreme Arbiter of
Events. In short, the Society is archaic, originating at a period before
we became, to all practical purposes, a distinct People; a race which,
though having various superficial traits in common with the English
inheriting the same blood with ourselves, is nevertheless, at bottom,
unlike; as is frequently observable in uterine brothers who, while in
physical aspect a stranger can hardly tell them apart, yet brought to
the test of essential character, may be even more than dissimilar.
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FRAGMENT
Of such redundant natures can it be possible that any can at last be
narrowed down to the bier? Yes, die, and in a sense, intestate, too, as
leaving no intellectual estate? Nothing indeed but an imperfect memory
that ages avow, and is gone? Is this the end of that splendour? But why
not? According to authoritative interpreters, the evanescence, the
nothingness of things glorious, redounds to the glory of Omnipotence.
And with what other aim in view, the theologians would like to know, did
the Magnanimous call out the worlds? Two or three hundred years ago, to
the amazement of the telescopes, a strange star appeared in the
constellation of Cassiopeia, and shining there like a planet for a brief
term, abruptly disappeared, and was seen no more. Nor was any star-dust
left to tell of the fleet passage. True, out of the same Unknown or
Nothing, and back into it again, millions of small meteors come and go;
but extinction is signalised in the instance of stars of magnitude; and
in corresponding degree the glory of God is magnified, who can work such
wonders, to whom the planets are of even less consideration than to the
Grand Mogul his golden buttons.
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FRAGMENTS FROM A WRITING-DESK
CLIPPING FROM THE ‘DEMOCRATIC PRESS AND LANSINGBURGH ADVERTISER’
No. 1
LANSINGBURGH, N.Y.,
_Saturday, May 4, 1839_.
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