Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/106

 Wood, advancing' to the stand, presented Mr. Temple Houston, of Brazoria, youngest son of General Sam Houston, who had been invited to deliver the address.

"While the defective acoustic properties of the hall prevented those in the rear from catching all that was said, those nearer to the speaker were permitted the enjoyment of a fervent yet finished tribute, which fully attested that the eloquence of the sire had not been withheld from the son. Mr. Houston spoke as follows:

" 'I would wish my auditors to understand that I attribute the honor of this invitation, not to my personal importance, but to the fact that I happen to be the child of one of the soldiers at San Jacinto. The pleasure that I derive from this occasion is lessened by the absence of Mollie E. Moore Davis. Could I have stood beside her to-night, I would have felt more than honored, for I know that I speak the voice of my State when I say that hers is as sweet a tongue as ever rung the silver chimes of earthly thought.

" 'It is a beautiful custom of free people to rear above the last resting-places of their heroic dead, some token commemorative of the cause in which they fell, and expressive of the grateful reverence felt toward them by posterity. This gratitude dwells in the breasts of freemen only—no real hero's monument was ever built by a race of slaves. The decay of monuments, the forgetfulness ot departed greatness, are sure precursors of a nation's fall. It is with a proud consciousness that I view the sea-girt city, the island queen, first in honoring the memory of our dead heroes, as she is first in population and commercial greatness, wearing with the jewels of her wealth a patriotism that seems all the brighter for adorning the metropolis of the Southwest. While this patriotic reverence dwells in the hearts of our people, the flames on the altars of Texan liberty will never cease to burn. On an occasion like this one realizes the feebleness of language; it speaks so little of what is felt. The story of the strife in which our heroes fell need not be told; history has recorded it. Their valor needs no eulog'y, even could my lowly lips utter such. For Fame's clarion has sounded their praises, and earth is the only limit of their renown. But as in the sheer magnitude of its results, the battle of San Jacinto has but few, if any, parallels, allusion to those results may not seem improper. Never before has the surface of a land changed with such marvellous rapidity as has Texas in the last four or five decades. Only a few years back and the plumed and crested Algonquin roamed over magnificent Texas, sole lord of its vast wastes, save where a few isolated missions sought vainly to weave religion's silken fetters over the savage mind. Yonder billows, blue and restless, dashed then as grandly against your level shores as now, but on their tossing bosoms floated not the freighted wealth of earth's nations, as does now. These same breezes, damp from dalliance with the waves, and laden with perfume stolen from the flowers, swept over our broad plains, but fanned not the cheek of civilized man. Our silver streams, rolling on to mingle their crystal waters with the stormy surges of the great deep, murmured as sweetly and sparkled as brightly as now, but they moistened not the lips of the Anglo-Saxon, and turned not a single mill-wheel; nor cotton nor wheat field smiled in all their valleys. The brown buffalo cropt undisturbed the green grass from our prairies, and the spotted deer rested