The writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, Volume 6.
John Greenleaf Whittier, Ed.

It has been our privilege to live in an eventful period, and to witness wonderful changes since we conned our lessons together. How little we then dreamed of the steam car, electric telegraph, and telephone.! We studied the history and geography of a world only half explored. Our country was an unsolved mystery. ‘The Great American Desert’ was an awful blank on our school maps. We have since passed through the terrible ordeal of civil war, which has liberated enslaved millions, and made the union of the States an established fact, and no longer a doubtful theory. If life is to be measured not so much by years as by thoughts, emotion, knowledge, action, and its opportunity of a free exercise of all our powers and faculties, we may congratulate ourselves upon really outliving the venerable patriarchs. For myself, I would not exchange a decade of my own life for a century of the Middle Ages, or a ‘cycle of Cathay.’

Let me, gentlemen, return my heartiest thanks to you, and to all who have interested themselves in the preparation of the Academy Album, and assure you of my sincere wishes for your health and happiness.