Festival (Volume 1) (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1850 Excerpt: ... APPENDIX. The Committee on Invitations sent Letters to many distinguished "Sons of New Hampshire," from whom the following replies were received: --From Son. Lewis Cass, Senator from Michigan. Detroit, Oct. 30, 1849. Gentlemen: I wish I could accept your invitation to attend the Festival of the Sons of New Hampshire, to be held at Boston, on the seventh of November. But I cannot, though my heart will be with you on that interesting occasion. Interesting to you, but much more so to those who long since left their native State, and whom the accidents of life have removed far from her borders. The second half century has commenced since I became an emigrant from my own home, and my father's home, and sought that land of promise in the then distant West, which has been to me, as to so many others, a land of performance. But though I may have.too often neglected, yet I have never forgotten the lessons of wisdom, and virtue, which I learned in our father.land, and to which I owe much of the success, undeserved on my part, which has attended me through life. There are climates more genial, and regions less rugged than the land of our birth presents: but the sun shines upon no country where human nature is more elevated, or where the social condition is higher or happier. After an absence of thirty.three years, and after taking my part in the foundation of an empire in the Western forest, one of the proudest victories man has ever gained, over the obstacles of nature, I revisited my native town, and I left it, satisfied that virtue, and intelligence, and domestic happiness, depend little upon natural advantages, and that, in these elements of prosperity, social and political, the sons of New Hampshire may fear no comparison hetween their native State, and the most f...