The suitable steps for erecting the work will be taken without unnecessary delay. Meantime it is requested, as this statement is not addressed to the public, that it may not find its way into the newspapers.

F. C. GRAY, Chairman.

EDWARD EVERETT, Secretary.

BOSTON, September 14, 1827.

In consequence of this invitation, a considerable number of the graduates of the college subscribed the sum proposed towards the erection of the monument. In the summer of 1828, the committee of arrangements found themselves enabled to proceed to the execution of their trust. They applied to the selectmen of Charlestown for permission to erect the monument on the burying hill in that town, which request was promptly granted. A contract was then entered into, between the treasurer of the fund and Mr Solomon Willard, architect, for the immediate execution of the work. In pursuance of this contract, the monument was hewn, by permission, from the quarry of the Bunker Hill Monument Association, at Quincy. Mr Almoran Holmes was employed by the architect to transport it from the quarry to the burying hill. For this purpose nineteen yoke of oxen were employed. Its weight is between twelve and thirteen tons. It was raised to its position on the hill by Mr Holmes, on the 26th of the month, by the application of a powerful apparatus, by which the mass was held suspended freely in the air, till, at a signal given, it was lowered to its destined place.

The monument is a solid obelisk, fifteen feet in height, four feet square at the larger extremity, and two at the smaller, and rises from a substantial foundation, without a base, from the surface of the ground. On the eastern face is inscribed the name of Harvard, in large letters and in high relief — the first experiment, it is believed, of this kind in working the granite of this country. Beneath this name is an English inscription, and on the opposite face an inscription in Latin, wrought in white marble tablets by Mr A. Carey, and attached to the shaft. The monument is enclosed in a simple iron railing, surrounding a space nine feet square, and stands on a beautiful and commanding position on the top of the burying hill in Charlestown.

The 26th day of September, being the anniversary of the decease of Harvard,* was fixed upon for the erection of the monument, of which notice was given in the public papers the day before. The corporation and faculty of Harvard College, the president of the United States, the Rev. Dr Kirkland, the committee appointed by the citizens of Charlestown on the subject of the monument, Hon. T. H. Perkins, president of the Bunker Hill Monument Association, and S. Willard, Esq., architect of the monument, had been invited by the committee of arrangements to attend on this occasion. A large company of spectators, students of the university, and citizens at large, were also present. At eleven o'clock precisely, the Rev. Dr Walker, pastor of the Second Congregational Church in

* See the concluding paragraph of note A, p. 183.

Charlestown, introduced the ceremonial by a prayer, and the monument was then lowered to its permanent position.

The president of the United States, having been obliged to return to Washington, and being thereby prevented from attending on this occasion, had addressed the following letter to Dr Parkman, a member of the committee of arrangements, which was now read:

DEAR SIR:

WASHINGTON, September 21, 1828.

Among the many privations incident to my sudden but necessary departure from home, to return to my family here, was that of the pleasure which I had indulged the hope of enjoying, by personal participation in that act of filial reverence to the memory of our common benefactor, "one Mr Harvard," in which you are so worthily engaged.

In compliance with your request, I had, I believe, rashly promised to address a few remarks to the spectators who may be assembled to witness the erection of this tardy monument - a monument creditable to the feelings of those by whom it is now raised, but which can add little to the renown of him whom it is intended to honor.

The name of Harvard is not one of those towards which his own age or their posterity can be chargeable with ingratitude. From the very interesting printed paper enclosed in your letter, it appears that from the first institution of the college it received his name an honor far beyond the reach of brass, marble, or granite. A single act of posthumous benevolence has enrolled him among the benefactors of mankind; and of the thousands who in the lapse of two centuries have drank from the fountain of living waters opened in the rock of the desert at the touch of his staff, what soul so insensible has there been among them, as not to cherish the memory of him, to whose bounty they have been indebted for so much of their intellectual cultivation and of their moral refinement! His name, identified from the first with the University which he founded, shares in all the honors of all her sons; and his bequest, the amount of which must be measured by the spirit with which it was bestowed, has erected to his honor a monument in the heart of every pupil admitted within her walls, which, renewed from year to year, and multiplied from age to age, will endure long after granite, brass, and marble shall have crumbled into dust.

I do not think it surprising that the contemporary memorials of the person and character of Mr Harvard are so scanty. Your "New England's First Fruits" mention him with honor as a godly gentleman, and a lover of learning: but these were qualities very common among the first settlers of New England. All the principal founders both of the Plymouth and Massachusetts colonies were persons of family, education, and high intellectual refinement. Neither trading, speculation, nor romantic adventure, had any share in the motives of their emigration. There might be, and doubtless was, some mixture of worldly ambition interwoven with the purposes of individuals among them; but in the annals of the world New England stands alone as emphatically the colony of conscience. Mr Harvard was not one of the original settlers. He came eight or ten years after them, when provision had been amply made for the first wants of nature and of society. Food, raiment,

shelter, the worship of God, and civil government, had all been successively acquired and instituted. These are the first necessities of civilized man, and these having been supplied, the next in natural course was education. Harvard came, with a considerable estate, precisely at the time when this want was pressing most heavily upon them. Other colonies have fallen into the practice of sending their children to be educated in the schools and colleges of the mother country. But it was precisely against the doctrines of those schools and colleges that the New England colonies had been settled. They were therefore debarred of that resource, and constrained to rely for the education of their children upon themselves.

Harvard was himself a clergyman. Possessed of a fortune competent to a comfortable subsistence in his native country, his emigration could have been dictated only by principles of moral and religious duty. But these motives were common to the great mass of the first settlers, whose sincerity had been tested by greater sacrifices and sufferings than appear to have been required or endured by him. He probably was not involved in those vehement religious controversies upon questions unintelligible to us and to them, but upon which they wasted their understanding and their affections. He was not distinguished among the divines of the age as a disputant. He took a less beaten path to the veneration of after times, and a shorter road to heaven.

I shall assuredly be with you, at the performance of your truly filial duties, in spirit and inclination. For your kind, good wishes accept the hearty return and thanks of your friend and brother pupil of Harvard,

J. Q. ADAMS.

To Dr GEORGE PARKMAN, Boston.

The foregoing address was then delivered by Mr EDWARD EVERETT, a member of the committee of arrangements, and at their request.

SPEECH AT NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE.*

MR PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:

THE toast which has just been announced, and the kind attention, of which I find myself on this occasion the object, demand my particular acknowledgments. Coming among you from a remote district of the country; personally acquainted, on my arrival, with but a single individual besides your distinguished representative in Congress, (Hon. John Bell ;) possessing none of those public and political claims on your notice, which are usually acknowledged by courtesies of this kind, I find myself the honored guest of this day; cordially greeted by so large a company, where I could have expected only to form a few acquaintances; and made to feel myself at home in the land of strangers. I should feel that sense of oppression which unmerited honor ought always to produce, did I look within myself for the reason of this flattering distinction. It is not there, gentlemen, that I look for it. I know that it flows from a much higher source; from your ready hospitality; from your liberal feeling, which is able to take in those parts of the republic which are the most remote from you, and which disposes you, even towards the person of an individual stranger, to strengthen the bonds of good will between all the brethren of the great American family. It is in this view of the subject, alone, that I could reconcile my accepting this kind proffer of your public attentions with the inoffensive privacy which it is my study to preserve in my present journey; for the sake of which I have been led, on more than one occasion since I left home, to

* Delivered at a public dinner at Nashville, Tennessee, 2d June, 1829.

express a wish to be excused from similar attentions on the part of political friends-attentions which would have implied a public standing which I do not possess, and would have caused my excursion to be ascribed to another than its real motive.

That motive, gentlemen, is the long-cherished wish to behold, with my own eyes, this western world, not of promise merely, but of most astonishing and glorious fulfilment. The wonders, as they may justly be called, of the west; the prodigious extent of the territory; the magnitude of the streams that unite into one great system the remotest parts of this almost boundless region; the fertility of its soil, of which the accounts, till they are verified by actual observation, seem rather like the fables of romance than sober narrative, were among the earliest objects that attracted my youthful curiosity. While visiting some of the most ancient abodes of civilization in the old world, I had frequent occasion to observe, (and I have no doubt, Mr President,* that your observation confirmed the fact,) that the curiosity of the intelligent men of Europe is more awake on the subject of this, than of any other portion of our country. Of the Atlantic coast they have some general knowledge, arising from the length of time since it was settled, and the political events of which it has been the theatre; but the valley of the Mississippi seems to have presented itself, as it were suddenly, to their imaginations, as a most peculiar, important, and hitherto comparatively unknown region. But from the time that I have been led more particularly to reflect on the western country, in its social relations to the rest of the Union, I have felt an irresistible desire to endeavor to understand, from personal observation, the stupendous work of human advancement which is here going on, and of which the history of mankind certainly affords no other example. I cannot but think it the most interesting subject of contemplation which the world at present affords. Apart from the grand natural features of the

* Hon. Geo. W. Campbell, formerly secretary of the treasury, and minister of the United States at St Petersburg.