brilliant prospects invite our enthusiasm! What solemn warnings at once
demand our vigilance and moderate our confidence! The Old World has
already revealed to us, in its unsealed books, the beginning and the
end of all marvelous struggles in the cause of liberty.

"Greece! lovely Greece! 'the land of scholars and the nurse of arms,'
where sister republics, in fair processions chanted the praise of
liberty and the good, where and what is she? For two thousand years the
oppressors have bound her to the earth. Her arts are no more. The last
sad relics of her temples are but the barracks of a ruthless soldiery;
the fragments of her columns and her palaces are in the dust, yet
beautiful in ruins.

"She fell not when the mighty were upon her. Her sons united at
Thermopylæ and Marathon; and the tide of her triumph rolled back upon
the Hellespont. She was conquered by her own factions--she fell by the
hands of her own people. The man of Macedonia did not the work of
destruction. It was already done by her own corruptions, banishments,
and dissensions. Rome! whose eagles glanced in the rising and setting
sun, where and what is she! The Eternal City yet remains, proud even in
her desolation, noble in her decline, venerable in the majesty of
religion, and calm as in the composure of death.

"The malaria has but traveled in the parts won by the destroyers. More
than eighteen centuries have mourned over the loss of the empire. A
mortal disease was upon her before Cæsar had crossed the Rubicon; and
Brutus did not restore her health by the deep probings of the
senate-chamber. The Goths, and Vandals, and Huns, the swarms of the
North, completed only what was begun at home. Romans betrayed Rome. The
legions were bought and sold, but the people offered the tribute-money.