Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 9.djvu/168

 THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS sciousness — a national era, a mood, a hope, a dread, a despair — ^in which you listen to the spo- ken history of the time. There is an eloquence of an expiring nation, such as seems to sadden the glorious speech of Demosthenes; such as breathes grand and gloomy from the visions of the prophets of the last days of Israel and Judah; such as gave a spell to the expression of Grattan and of Kossuth — the sweetest, most mournful, most awful of the words which man may utter, or which man may hear — the elo- quence of a perishing nation. There is another eloquence, in which the national consciousness of a young or renewed and vast strength, of trust in a dazzling, certain, and limitless future, an inward glorying in victories yet to be won, sounds out as by voice of clarion, challenging to contest for the highest prize of earth; such as that in which the leader of Israel in its first days holds up to the new nation the Land of Promise ; such as that which in the well-imagined speeches scattered by Livy over the history of the ** majestic series of victories'* speaks the Roman consciousness of growing aggrandizement which should subject the world; such as that through which, at the tribunes of her revolution, in the bulletins of her rising soldiers, France told to the world her dream of glory. And of this kind somewhat is ours — cheerful, hopeful, trusting, as befits youth and spring ; the eloquence of a State beginning to ascend to the 158