"The drugs, the charms,
The conjuration and the mighty magic,
He's won our daughters with,"
well might he reply, that in endeavoring to relieve the oppressed, to
elevate the poor, and to instruct and edify those of a happier
condition, he had only held "the mirror up to Nature. To show virtue her
own form--scorn her own image." That "this only was the witchcraft he
had used;" and, did he need proof of this, there are many fair girls on
both sides of the water who, though they might not repeat the whole of
Desdemona's speech to a married man, yet could each tell him,
"That if he had a friend that loved her,
He should but teach him how to tell _his stories_,
And that would win her."
I would, gentlemen, it were in my power to present, as on the mirror in
the Arabian tale, the various scenes in our extended country, where the
master-mind of our guest is at this moment acting. In the empty
school-room, the boy at his evening task has dropped his grammar, that
he may roam with Oliver or Nell. The traveller has forgotten the fumes
of the crowded steamboat, and is far off with our guest, among the green
valleys and hoary hills of old England. The trapper, beyond the Rocky
Mountains, has left his lonely tent, and is unroofing the houses in
London with the more than Mephistopheles at my elbow. And, perhaps, in
some well-lighted hall, the unbidden tear steals from the father's eye,
as the exquisite sketch of the poor schoolmaster and his little scholar
brings back the form of that gifted boy, whose "little hand" worked its
wonders under his guidance, and who, in the dawning of intellect and
warm affections, was summoned from the school-room and the play-ground
forever. Or to some bereaved mother the tender sympathies and womanly
devotion, the touching purity of little Nell, may call up the form where
dwelt that harmonious soul, which uniting in itself God's best gifts,
for a short space shed its celestial light upon her household, and then
vanishing, "turned all hope into memory."
But it is not to scenes like these that I would now recall you. I would
that my voice could reach the ear of every admirer of our guest
throughout the land, that with us they might welcome him, on this, his
first public appearance to our shores. Like the rushing of many waters,
the response would come to us from the bleak hills of Canada, from the
savannas of the South, from the prairies of the West, uniting in an
"earthquake voice" in the cheers with which we welcome Charles Dickens
to this new world.