‘ [255] think that these occasions are precisely the times for set discourses, but rather for a few words of feeling, of gratitude, and of appreciation.’
The Sub-Dean, in accepting the bust, remarked that it was impossible not to feel, in doing so, that they were accepting a very great honor to the country. He could conceive that if the great poet were allowed to look down on the transactions of that day, he would not think it unsatisfactory that his memorial had been placed in that great Abbey among those of his brothers in poetry. The Chancellor of the Exchequer moved a vote of thanks to the honorary secretary and the honorary treasurer, and said he thought he had been selected for the duty because he had spent two or three years of his life in the United States, and a still longer time in some of the British colonies. It gave him the greater pleasure to do this, having known Mr. Longfellow in America, and having from boyhood enjoyed his poetry, which was quite as much appreciated in England and her dependencies as in America. Wherever he had been in America, and where-ever he had met Americans, he had found there was one place at least which they looked upon as being as much theirs as it was England's—that place was the Abbey Church of Westminster.
This text is part of:
Boston and New York, Hougton, Mifflin and company, 1902.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.