Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/185

Rh or the new-born son. Henceforth the day of newly welcomed love, the day of newly welcomed life, is an epoch of delight, marked for thanksgiving with a white stone in their calends of time,—their day of Annunciation or of Advent, a gladsome anniversary in their lives for many a year.

When these married mates are grown maturely wed, they rejoice to live over again their early loves, a second time removing the hindrances which once strewed all the way, dreaming anew the sweet prophetic dream of early hope, and bringing back the crimson mornings and the purple nights of golden days gone by, which still keep "trailing clouds of glory" as they pass. At their silver wedding, they are proud to see their children's manlifying face, and remember how, one by .one, these olive-plants came up about their ever-widening hearth.

When old and full of memories of earth, their hopes chiefly of heaven now, they love to keep the golden wedding of their youthful joy, children and children's children round their venerable board.

Thus the individual man seeks to commemorate his private personal joy, and build up a monument of his domestic bliss.

So, in the life of a nation, there are proud days, when the people joined itself to some great idea of justice, truth, and love; took some step forward in its destiny, or welcomed to national baptism some institution born of its great idea. The anniversaries of such events become red-letter days in the almanac of the nation; days of rejoicing, till that people, old and gray with manifold experience, goes the way of all the nations, as of all its men.

Thus, on the twenty-second of December, all New England thanks God for those poor pilgrims whose wearied feet first found repose in this great wilderness of woods, not broken then. Each year, their children love to gather on the spot made famous now, and bring to mind the ancient deed; to honour it with speech and song, not without prayers to God. That day there is a springing of New England blood, a beating of New England hearts; not only here, but wherever two or three are gathered together in the name of New England, there is the memory of the pilgrims in the midst of them; and among the prairies of the West, along the rivers of the South, far off where the