With the refrain: Another was: Oh, it was wonderful-blest be His name! "In Thy cleft, O Rock of Ages When the fitful tempest rages, Where no mortal arm can sever From my heart Thy love forever, That hymn I shall never forget. The last time it was my privilege to be at his house, only a few weeks before he passed away, after dinner was over, we all repaired to the parlor, and he himself suggested that we should have some music. His grandson Joseph was there, and we knew therefore that there was a rich treat in store for us. In the singing he was the principal figure. Standing in the broad space opening into the hall, with violin in hand, he struck up the last mentioned hymn, "In Thy cleft, O Rock of Ages!" and sang it through to the very end, with a pathos that moved us all. We all spoke of it afterwards. It seemed to so take hold of him. The closing lines especially, seemed to touch the great depths of his nature. I can almost hear now, the deep mellow tones of that voice, and feel the solemnity that pervaded the room as he sang the words: "In the sight of Jordan's billow, as if he had a kind of presentiment that the end was near, that he was already standing on the very brink of that Jordan over which he has since passed, and over which, one by one, we shall all pass. The prayer which he uttered that night, "Let Thy bosom be my pillow, Hide me, O Thou Rock of Ages, I believe has been answered. His noble head was pillowed, I believe, on the bosom of the "Strong Son of God," when he fell asleep in death, and that he is safe in Him. It is hard to realize that he is no longer among us; that we shall no longer see his noble form, nor hear his eloquent voice, nor receive from him the gracious benediction of that radiant smile which so often played upon his face. He is gone, but the memory of his great deeds remains. Never, can we forget him. Never, can we cease to hold him in grateful remembrance. What he was, and what he did, will remain to us forever, a joy and an inspiration. "Mourn for the man of amplest influence, Yet clearest of ambitious crime: Our greatest, yet with least pretence, In his simplicity, sublime. O good gray head which all men knew, O voice, from which their omens all men drew, O iron nerve to true occasion true; Oh! fallen at length, that tower of strength, Which stood foursquare to all the winds that blew." To those of us who are members of the race with which he was identified, let me say, Let us keep his shining example ever before us. Let each one of us, individually and personally, endeavor to catch his noble spirit; to walk upon the same lofty plane of a pure and exalted manhood, upon which he moved; and together, in the consciousness of the fact that he is no longer with us, let us consecrate ourselves, with whatever powers we may possess, to the furtherance of the great cause to which he gave his life. And may I not also, in his name, appeal to the members of the opposite race, especially to those who revere his memory, to join with us in continuing to fight for the great principles for which he contended, until, in all sections of this fair land, there shall be equal opportunities for all, irrespective of race, color, or previous condition of servitude; until to borrow the language of another, "character, not color, shall stamp the man and woman, " and until black and white shall clasp friendly hands, in the consciousness of the fact that we are all brethren, and that God is the father of us all. MEMORIAL ADDRESS, BY REV. J. E. RANKIN, D. D., PRESIDENT OF HOWARD UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON, D. C. Members of St. Mark's Lyceum, Ladies and Gentlemen, Citizens of New York: No greater occasion could have called you together. When you do honor to the memory of Frederick Douglass, you do honor to yourselves; you do honor to humanity; you do honor to God. When God finishes a life, it is as though he had written a book. He writes it and gives it to us to read. For the last half century there has been no more unique, no more important or remarkable figure in the history of American civilization. Ex-Senator Evarts has said: "He was one of the greatest Americans of this century." He combined in himself an epitome of what American slavery was; of what noble ambitions it sometimes repressed; of what fires of genius it sometimes quenched; of what treasures untold, what immortal possibilities were in its ashes. He stood forth an illustration of the mean meanness of the falsehood that all great gifts, intellectual and moral, are of Anglo-Saxon origin; that it is only the Caucasian whom God made in his own image. With his crown of snow he towered to mountain heights among the great men of his generation, and greeted them as neighbors; in no respect discredited, in no respect overtopped. Notwithstanding all the vicissitudes of his eventful career when like clouds around a mountain summit they had passed, his figure stood there serene and unmoved. It will so stand forever, for death has only made permanent what life had done. This is my text: Isaiah. xiii. 12.-"I will make a man more precious than fine gold; even a man, than the golden wedge of Ophir." It is a new valuation of a man which a nation makes, when with the mailed hand of war she smites the chains off four million bondmen and makes them free; takes off the petty price put upon their muscles and bones, and labels them with the valuation of their Creator, God. There was a time, even before the Emancipation Proclamation, when the golden wedge of Ophir would have been a high price to pay for Frederick Bailey, otherwise Frederick Douglass; but it was when he was in England, where the slave-holder could not sample him, nor the slave-owner deliver the goods, and when the day of his return was not quite certain. When on February 20, last, Frederick Douglass died, it was the closing of an epoch-the epoch of emancipation, of the new valuation of man. This is the best way to study human history, by epochs; to study epochs by great men. "There is One that openeth and no man shutteth; that shutteth and no man openeth." God has shut this epoch. He is a God that hideth Himself. When the Hebrew babe, Moses, was taken from the waters of the Nile, no one but the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob knew, that this was the great leader and legislator of Egypt's escaping bondmen; that he was to divide seas, smite rocks, bring manna from heaven; take from God's own hand the tables of the law, amid the portents of Sinai. “And when she had opened the ark she saw the child and the babe wept." No other advocate was there then, and no other was needed, than those tears. This babe might have become the son of Pharaoh's daughter and his mummied image been exhumed in the line of the Pharaohs, but God had a grander rôle for him, and in his bottle he gathered these tears. This was the way in which God caused this barque, braided by the fingers of a mother's love, and committed to the waters by a mother's faith, to float its infant occupant into the palace of the Pharaohs. For he was to suck the breast of kings. He was to need all the accumulated wisdom of Egypt. This was the way in which God began the political history of a people whose sacred books were to dominate the civilization of the whole earth. And here is another great leader, the babe, Frederick, just as carelessly treated in his beginnings. If God does not remember him, who will? When an heir to an earthly throne is born, every precaution is taken to prevent the surreptitious introduction of a changeling, in whose veins flows no royal blood; his birth hour is witnessed and recorded; every care is taken of his infancy and boyhood; every advantage of culture is provided for his unfolding manhood; universities open to him their golden gates; dignities and titles are conferred upon him, and he goes on in his upward ascent, till he reaches the seat, to which he has been all his life long the heir-apparent. But this heirapparent, this Frederick Douglass, was born a waif, out of Christian wedlock, in a slave cabin in Maryland. He was herded with other slave children, as the young of animals are herded, that in due time he might be ready as waiter, as field hand, if need be for the market, the auctionblock, and cotton plantation, extinction in Alabama and Louisiana. There are colored men who are ashamed of their origin, who make a very minute mathematical calculation—a kind of homeopathic dilution, and the finer they reduce it the more potency-they are high dilutionists, to determine how little African blood flows in their veins. It was not so with Frederick Douglass. He had the courage of his color: to stand as God made him. He speaks of his male ancestor as his presumed Anglo-Saxon father! But toward his Afro-American mother his heart yearns all his life long. Her face follows him into his boyhood dreams. She broods over him, as with angel wings. Can you think of anything more pathetic than his protracted search of some picture, some woman's face, which shall recover to his memory his mother's scattered features? This was the woman, lost from the page of earthly life, who, had she known the future of her son's greatness, might have said with Eve, of her first-born, "I have gotten a man from the Lord." Although this man, unlike the other, was willing to become his brother's keeper. In a volume on the "Types of Mankind," which in his travels Mr. Douglass found in London, occurs a face, which finally answers to the tenacious memories, the eager yearnings of his boyhood. It is not the face of a woman, but the face of one of Egypt's Pharaohs, Rameses the Great. A face, young, beautiful, with regular feaures, and great pathetic eyes, as though already bewildered at the crowd of life's mysteries. The old slave law made the children follow the destiny of the mother. It was a law of thrift that seemed to comfort the mother, and was sure to enrich the master. It sweetened the mother's present lot, but also embittered her anticipations. There is something of the same law in men of great and original genius. They seldom resemble their father, but trace their greatness to their mother. And I like to recall these brave words of this most remarkable of the Afro-American race; the man who had charmed two continents with his eloquence; who carved his way from a Maryland slave-pen to the court of kings; the man who made his generation confront again the old Egyptian type of kings; whose very physiognomy reminds you of the face of the Sphinx. These are his words: "I am happy to attribute any love of letters I may have, not to my presumed Anglo-Saxon paternity, but to the native genius of my sable, unprotected, and uncultivated mother; a woman who belonged to a race whose mental endowments are still disparaged and despised." "Presumed Anglo-Saxon paternity!" "Unprotected mother!" Ah, what volumes are in this phraseology. He could not forget the indignity which gave him birth. If he blushed, it was not for his mother! It was into the immediate group of illustrious men, every one of whom deserves a statue in Monumental Hall, Capitol Hill, Washington, that God set this young man, a black diamond of the first water, at the outset of his career. It is Russell Lowell who says that Abraham Lincoln reminds us of the men in Plutarch's Lives. It was a period that made such men. There were scores of them all over the land. They seemed to spring from the earth. It was true of Lloyd Garrison, with his deathless utterance: "In the name of God, who has made us of one blood, and in whose image we are created, in the name of the Messiah, who came to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, I demand the immediate emancipation of those who are living in slavery on American soil." "I am in earnest, I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard." Martin Luther over again. It was true of Wendell Phillips, of whom I have heard Mr. Douglass speak with unqualified affection; of Wendell Phillips, "the expectancy and rose of the fair state," who was born to the eloquence and culture of noblest New England as his native right; within his easy reach any prize, whether literary, legal, political, which he might care to seize, and who counted every proud |