A Discourse on the Formation and Development of the American Mind: Delivered Before the Literary Societies of Lafayette College, at Easton, Pa; On the 20th September 1837 (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

Robert J. Breckinridge

Softcover

ISBN 10: 133078085X ISBN 13: 9781330780855

Publisher: Forgotten Books, 2018

Synopsis

Excerpt from A Discourse on the Formation and Development of the American Mind: Delivered Before the Literary Societies of Lafayette College, at Easton, Pa; On the 20th September 1837

The fashion of this world passeth away. Even as we use its high est gifts, they perish beneath our trembling hands. Its most en chanting beauties fade while we gaze delightedly'upon them. Its noblest monuments turn to dust, as with unsteady feet we traverse their august courts. Its awful names cut into its most costly mar bles, live dimly in characters, distorted or well nigh effaced: and those mighty institutions which made these names sacred, vanish away, even more completely than they. Amidst this grand and mournful scene,the great human helrd passes onward as heedlessly as if it trod not on the ashes of the glorious dead; hearing no voice from the mighty ruins of the past, - seeing no promise in the majes ty of coming events. And they whose hearts burn with inward fire amidst events so vast yet so evanescent, they too are borne onward by the same resistless tide, that sweeps all else away; the glory for which they sigh, the mere reflexion of the ruins over which they hasten, and the very works which should win it for them, buried um der the fragments of those systems they were intended to commem orate.

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Edition details

• Publisher: Forgotten Books
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 133078085X
• ISBN 13: 9781330780855
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 44