Everett, Edward

Edward (1794-1865), an American orator and statesman. He was a native of Boston and was educated at Harvard University. He entered the Unitarian ministry, and afterward studied abroad to fit himself for a professorship of Greek literature in Harvard. Through the editorship of the North American Review, which he filled ably for a few years, he gained an introduction to public life. He served in Congress, both as a representative and senator, was three times governor of Massachusetts, went to England as minister plenipotentiary, acted as president of Harvard College from 1845-9, and was secretary of state in the cabinet of President Fillmore. Edward Everett was a noted orator. At the dedication of the Gettysburg Monument he delivered the address of the day. He is credited with saying that his elaborate address would be forgotten, but that the words spoken by Abraham Lincoln on that occasion would live forever. His public addresses and speeches were published in 1892 in four volumes.

How different the grains of our Atlantic gold, sown by the prudent hand of man, in this kindly alternation of seed-time and harvest; each curiously, mysteriously organized; hard, horny, seeming lifeless on the outside, but wrapping up in the interior a seminal germ, a living principle! Drop a grain of California gold into the ground, and there it will lie unchanged to the end of time, the clods on which it falls not more cold and lifeless. Drop a grain of our gold, of our blessed gold, into the ground, and lo! a mystery. In a few days it softens, it swells, it shoots upward, it is a living thing.

It is yellow itself, but it sends up a delicate spire, which comes peeping, emerald green, through the soil; it expands to a vigorous stalk; revels in the air and sunshine; arrays itself, more glorious than Solomon, in its broad, fluttering, leafy robes, whose sound, as the west wind whispers through them, falls as pleasantly on the husbandman's ear as the rustle of his sweetheart's garment; still towers aloft, spins its verdant skeins of vegetable floss, displays its dancing tassels, surcharged with fertilizing dust, and at last ripens into two or three magnificent batons like this (an ear of Indian corn), each of which is studded with hundreds of grains of gold, every one possessing the same wonderful properties as the parent grain, every one instinct with the same marvelous reproductive powers.