Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/107

Rh beneath the cool shade of our forest oaks. Texas, lovely Texas, was as fair, as fresh, and as beautiful as was Eden when God, delighted, gazed on the new-born world. It was thus when came the men whose memory we to-day honor. These pioneers were the heralds of a new civilization—one that was born in the medijeval convulsions of England, nurtured under the shadow of Virginia's mountains, and that flashed forth freed and panoplied from the struggles of the American revolution—a civilization whose fundamental principle was civil and religious liberty. Coming to Texas, it rested for a moment under the frown of the Spanish civilization, which was developed on the glittering thrones of Europe, and in the torture chambers of the Inquisition. One idolized, the other abhorred civil and religious liberty. When the Anglo-Saxon settlements had attained a magnitude sufficient to invite governmental interference, the Mexicans adopted toward them an oppressive policy, typical of their institutions. This ignited the spark. You know the result; to-day is celebrative of those who suffered to bring them about. The conflict of the opposite types of civilization for the mastery of this continent was decided on the forest-fringed banks of a Texas stream. Never before in the history of the world were such gigantic results intrusted to so few combatants; but here let me say, sterner warriors or truer patriots than those who guarded the liberty of Texas, on that immortal day, never trod a battle-field. Had that little band quailed before the might of invading despotism, our Pacific shores might yet be unknown; the golden wealth of California would yet sleep in her mountain gorges; the silver treasures of Nevada would now slumber, hidden in their caverned homes; the two oceans would not have shaken hands across the completed lines of railways; the solitude of the Rocky Mountains would yet be a stranger to the shriek of the locomotive, and their awful silence broken by no sound save the voice of nature, when spoken in the deep roar of her swollen cataracts, in the rolling peals of her warring storms, and in the tremendous crash of her falling ice-fields, as they leap from their frozen homes, and desolate the green valleys nestling far beneath. On earth there walk no men like the veterans who freed Texas. Only a few of them linger among us now, and they will be here but a little while longer. Each year that passes thins their ranks. A few more days and the last will be gone. One by one the pale messenger is calling them across that river whose viewless farther shore is wrapt in the mists of doubt, the clouds of death. They hear another reveille whose floating notes we can not catch. Are they gathering for a grander battle? While they are among us we feel toward them with a devotion whose depth speech can never tell. No minions cringe around them, no servile knee is bent to them, but the homage of a free nation is the more than royal offering laid before them. No ducal star glitters on their breasts, no shining coronet encircles their brows, but around their gray locks beams a glory, by the side of which kingly splendors are dim. Cling tenderly to these old men, lor when they are gone nothing like them is left. Strike down your men of eminence, to-day, those who fill your highest seats, and with a wave of your hand you can summon around you hundreds like them—for the gifted sons of Texas are many—but when one of these old warriors drops from the line, earth has none to fill his place. Bitterly do we know that they leave us forever, for of all the manly forms laid low beneath the rod of Death, none have ever risen; of all the bright eyes he has closed, none have ever looked their loveliness on earth again; of all the eloquent lips silenced by his hand, none have ever spoken again; of