An Oration Delivered at Charlestown, Massachusetts; On the 17th of June, 1841, in Commemoration of the Battle of Bunker-Hill (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: melancholy memorials, are before our eyes. Across those calm blue waves is the land of the ancient enemy; the land where a misguided and tyrannical Monarch, a proud and heartless Ministry, and a subservient Parliament devised their fruitless measures for the subjugation of a people who owed them nothing for debt or favor; the land whence had come the hired soldiery then quartered upon the forced hospitality, and riotously disturbing the peace of the town of Boston. In that secure and beautiful harbor floated the ships of war, and the transports just arrived from Britain, which sent their military crew upon this shore, only to die upon the first spot of American soil which their feet should touch. Then we survey the fair and diversified peninsula upon which we stand, comprehending with its summits and its levels, but a square mile of earth. The south-eastern slope of Breed's Hill divides the waters of the bay into two broad rivers, which indent the shore, and just beyond the western base of Bunker's Hill, approach so near each other as to allow scarcely four hundred feet of breadth to the neck of land which unites the peninsula to the neighboring country. The Mystic on the north, washes with its double channel the farther shore. On the south, the opposite side of the mouth of the Charles, which in its narrowest span is about three hundred yards across, we see the now crowded peninsula of Boston, similarly environed by the waters of the sea, and united to the main land by a narrow neck. Upon a sloping eminence of that peninsula where it approaches nearest to us, we discern a place of graves, amid which was planted the battery whence came the missiles that reduced this nourishing town to a desolation. Around us is a glorious amphitheatre of hill tops, which sixty-six years ago on thi...