Does it seem all but incredible to you that intelligence should travel for two thousand miles, along those slender copper lines, far down in the all but fathomless Atlantic; never before penetrated … save when some foundering vessel has plunged with her hapless company to the eternal silence and darkness of the abyss? Does it seem … but a miracle … that the thoughts of living men … should burn over the cold, green bones of men and women, whose hearts, once as warm as ours, burst as the eternal gulfs closed and roared over them centuries ago?

God bless the Union; - it is dearer to us for the blood of brave men which has been shed in its defence.

There is no sanctuary of virtue like a home.

Drop a grain of California gold into the ground, and there it will lie unchanged until the end of time; . . . drop a grain of our blessed gold [wheat] into the ground and lo! a mystery.

I am only one but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something.

The man who stands upon his own soil, who feels, by the laws of the land in which he lives,-by the laws of civilized nations,-he is the rightful and exclusive owner of the land which he tills, is, by the constitution of our nature, under a wholesome influence, not easily imbibed from any other source.

You shall not pile, with servile toil, Your monuments upon my breast, Nor yet within the common soil, Lay down the wreck of power to rest...