Every American schoolboy who has had "to speak his piece" knows by heart the famous passage from this oration, beginning, "Venerable men! you have come down to us from a former generation. Heaven has bounteously lengthened out your lives, that you might behold this joyous day."
Mr. Webster's voice was in such good order that fifteen thousand people are said to have been able to hear him.
At the banquet during the same evening, the great orator said, "I shall never desire to behold again the { 215} awful spectacle of so many human faces all turned towards me."
Near the end, Lafayette visited Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. The veteran statesman, now eighty-one years old, drove his old-time friend and guest over to a grand banquet at the University of Virginia. James Madison was present. When the students and the great crowd of people saw Washington's friend seated between the two aged statesmen, a shout went up, the like of which, it was said, was never before heard in the Old Dominion.
When Lafayette arrived in America, in August, 1824, he first visited the national capital, and was formally received at the White House by President Monroe and by many of the great men of the country. On his return to Washington in 1825, he was told that Congress had voted him two hundred thousand dollars and two large tracts of land, for his services during the Revolution.
It was now September, and Lafayette had remained in this country much longer than he had expected. The new President, John Quincy Adams, gave him a farewell dinner at the White House, with a large party of notable men. The President's formal farewell to the country's guest is a classic in our literature.
Amid the blessings and the prayers of a grateful people, Lafayette sailed for France in the new and beautiful frigate Brandywine, which had been built and named in his honor.
{ 216} For years afterwards, some people used to tell their children, with a peculiar thrill and feeling of awe, that a beautiful rainbow arched the heavens just before Lafayette landed at Staten Island, and that an equally beautiful symbol of peace spanned the broad ocean, as the steamboat moved slowly down Chesapeake Bay, to take the nation's guest on board the Brandywine.
