It becomes the character of a great country; FIRSTLY,
because it is justice; SECONDLY, because without it you never can
have, and keep, a literature of your own.
Gentlemen, I thank you with feelings of gratitude, such as are not
often awakened, and can never be expressed. As I understand it to
be the pleasant custom here to finish with a toast, I would beg to
give you: AMERICA AND ENGLAND, and may they never have any
division but the Atlantic between them.
SPEECH: FEBRUARY 7, 1842.
Gentlemen,--To say that I thank you for the earnest manner in which
you have drunk the toast just now so eloquently proposed to you--to
say that I give you back your kind wishes and good feelings with
more than compound interest; and that I feel how dumb and powerless
the best acknowledgments would be beside such genial hospitality as
yours, is nothing. To say that in this winter season, flowers have
sprung up in every footstep's length of the path which has brought
me here; that no country ever smiled more pleasantly than yours has
smiled on me, and that I have rarely looked upon a brighter summer
prospect than that which lies before me now, {4} is nothing.
But it is something to be no stranger in a strange place--to feel,
sitting at a board for the first time, the ease and affection of an
old guest, and to be at once on such intimate terms with the family
as to have a homely, genuine interest in its every member--it is, I
say, something to be in this novel and happy frame of mind.
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