Siddons and Talma and Kean are acting--while
Mungo Park explores Africa, and Capt. Cook circumnavigates the
globe--through all the fortunes of the American Revolution, the
beginning, continuation and end, the battle of Brooklyn, the surrender
at Saratoga, the final peace of '83--through the lurid tempest of the
French Revolution, the execution of the king and queen, and the Reign
of Terror--through the whole of the meteor-career of Napoleon--through
all Washington's, Adams's, Jefferson's, Madison's, and Monroe's
Presidentiads--amid so many flashing lists of names, (indeed there
seems hardly, in any department, any end to them, Old World or New,)
Franklin, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mirabeau, Fox, Nelson, Paul Jones,
Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, Fulton, Walter Scott, Byron, Mesmer,
Champollion--Amid pictures that dart upon me even as I speak, and glow
and mix and coruscate and fade like aurora boreales--Louis the 16th
threaten'd by the mob, the trial of Warren Hastings, the death-bed
of Robert Burns, Wellington at Waterloo, Decatur capturing the
Macedonian, or the sea-fight between the Chesapeake and the
Shannon--During all these whiles,
I say, and though on a far different grade, running parallel and
contemporary with all--a curious, quiet yet busy life centred in a
little country village on Long Island, and within sound on still
nights of the mystic surf-beat of the sea. About this life, this
Personality--neither soldier, nor scientist, nor litterateur--I
propose to occupy a few minutes in fragmentary talk, to give some few
melanges, disconnected impressions, statistics, resultant groups,
pictures, thoughts' of him, or radiating from him.
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