_Tribute Paid to Parents, Jean Daniel Debs and Marguerite Bettrich Debs,
on behalf of the family, at Golden Wedding Anniversary, Terre Haute,
Ind., September 13, 1899_
The celebration of a Golden wedding is a rare occurrence in the history
of families; only to the favored few is such a blessing vouchsafed. It
is an occasion when nuptial vows pledged at Hymen’s altar take on
inexpressible sacredness. A far distant day is recalled when “two souls
with but a single thought” and two loving hearts that “beat as one”
courageously and confidently entered upon the voyage of matrimonial
life. Thomas Moore, inspired by the genius of love, rapturously sang:
“There’s a bliss beyond all that the minstrel has told,
When two, that are linked in one heavenly tie,
With heart never changing and brow never cold,
Live on thro’ all ills, and love on till they die.”
It is not given to us, children and grandchildren, who meet today at the
old home shrine to lay our offerings, consecrated by affection, upon the
family altar, to know the heart and soul yearnings of our aged parents
to find some favored spot, some oasis in the desert, where they could
build a home and enjoy the fruitions of peace and contentment amidst a
family of bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked and merry-voiced children.
In fancy’s eye we see their beautiful and vine-clad native France; we
see them in the bloom and strength of youth, standing at the altar and
pledging to each other unchanging fidelity in storm and shine, ready to
meet the future as the day unfolded their duties, their opportunities,
their tasks and trials, sustained by a faith and hope which cheered them
on their pilgrimage through all their married days.
Those of us who have reached years of maturity and are here with wives
and husbands and children and children’s children, may in fancy’s
telescopic vision see the youthful pair leaving the old for the new
world, whispering to each other with brimful eyes and quivering lips:
“Go where we will, this hand in thine,
Those eyes before me smiling thus,
Through good and ill, through storm and shine,
The world’s a world of love for us.”
And such has been the world to them. Love has been their guiding star;
no cloud ever obscured it, and the darker the day of adversity the
brighter shone their love which bathed their home and our home in its
mellow, cheering light.
In celebrating this golden wedding anniversary, all the halcyon days of
our lives are included and there come to us messages from the past,
under the sea and over the land, burdened with the aroma of violets and
roses, caught from the flower gardens of memory, planted in youth and
blooming in perennial beauty to old age.
I confess to you, my venerable parents, and to you my sisters and
brothers, and to those of younger generations, to overmastering emotions
of love and gratitude as I survey this family scene, never to be
pictured again save upon the canvas of our memories. But I would voice
no requiem note. Today our ears are not attuned to the dirge’s mournful
cadence. This is not the occasion for planting weeping-willows, the
cypress or the ivy vine—
“Creeping where grim death is seen.”
Here the mingled cup of love and gratitude and joy, brimful, is quaffed
in honor of an event which to us all is a priceless benediction; but, if
from its foundation a tear mingles with the draught to sparkle on the
brim of the loving cup, it bears testimony that our hearts are touched
by feelings as divine as ever sanctified human affection.
The serenity, the rare loveliness of this scene create emotions which no
words, however fitly chosen, can express. I can but say in the name of
my sisters and my brothers and those younger in the bonds of family
allegiance to our father—the patriarch of these sons and daughters—that
we tender him our warmest congratulations upon this rare occasion. When
we greet him our hearts are in our hands; when we kiss his time-furrowed
cheeks our hearts are on our lips, and when we congratulate him upon
this, his golden wedding anniversary, our hearts are in our words.
Freely do we avow the fealty of our love for his devotion to us, his
children, for his watchful guardianship over our giddy footsteps on
youth’s flowery pathways; and this love is blended with profound
veneration for his courage, which no vicissitude could dampen; for his
masculine virtues which have endeared him to the home circle; for his
spotless integrity of character which has given him the confidence of
men, whether in poverty’s vale or upon the more elevated plane of
prosperity, secured by industry and frugality, and above all, for that
parental ambition and self-denial to secure for us an education which
should equip his children for respectable and honorable positions in
life.
This, my beloved and honored sire, is the tribute of affection your
children bring to you today. Your tender and unceasing devotion has won
the overflowing gratitude of our hearts, and this thankfulness, this
abounding sense of obligation, dearest father, we children with the
fingers of our love weave today into a crown and place it on your
venerable head, and though the years shall continue to whiten your
locks, dim the lustre of your eyes and impair the strength of your manly
form, the wealth of our affection shall ever increase, nor shall it
cease when the silver cord be loosed and at the final goal you lay all
your burdens down.
And now our happy family circle, rejoicing in kindred ties, will fill
again the sparkling cup with the ambrosia of affection that we may drink
to:
“My mother’s voice! how often creep
Its accents on my lonely hours.
Like healing sent on wings of sleep,
Or dew to the unconscious flowers.
I can forget her melting prayer
While leaping pulses madly fly,
But in the still, unbroken air
Her gentle tone comes stealing by—
And years, and sin, and folly flee,
And leave me at my mother’s knee.”
There are two words in our language forever sacred to memory—Mother and
Home! Home, the heaven upon earth, and mother its presiding angel. To
us, children, here today, mother and home have realized all the longing,
yearning aspirations of our souls, and now, in this blissful presence,
we quaff to our mother this cup full and overflowing with the divine
nectar of our love. I need not attempt to recite her deeds of devotion.
There is not a page of our memory, not a table of our hearts, that is
not adorned and beautified by acts of her loving care, in which her
heart and her hands, her eyes and her soul, in holy alliance, ministered
to our happiness.
There was never a time when there was not a song in her heart, sweeter
than Æolian melody, wooing her children from folly to the blessedness,
security, peace and contentment of home. Her children were her jewels in
home’s shining circle, and if by the fiat of death a gem dropped away,
the affectionate care it had received added soulful charm to her lullaby
songs when at night she dismissed us and sent us to dreamland repose.
Years of duty and trial, anxiety and care have bowed her form, whitened
her hair, dimmed her eyes and robbed her cheeks of their maiden bloom;
but O, our mother is still to us our beautiful mother. Her heart is as
young and loving as when in infancy, in youth and in riper years it
throbbed responsive to our plaints; her hands are as beautiful in our
eyes as when in our childhood they were laid caressingly upon our heads,
and her dimpled fingers smoothed our hair or wooded back to order our
truant tresses, and her voice, though less resonant than in the years
when she called us from play to duty, has the same cadence as when
bending over us she sang the cradle song which lulled to sleep and to
dreams.
O, our mother! beloved more than any wealth of words could express, your
children on this anniversary day of your wedding fifty years ago, offer
you, aye shower upon you in the name of filial devotion, all the holiest
treasures of garnered affection.
“We give thee all, we can no more,
Though poor the offering be;
Our hearts—our love is all the store
And this we bring to thee.”
We hear the wedding bells ringing in celebration of the nuptials of our
aged parents—our ears are attuned to their merry chimes and our hearts
respond with all the joyousness of a wedding march, for peace and
happiness and contentment crown the hour. We do not ask what the future
has in store, we only know that we have the bride and groom in our
presence, and that it is an inexpressible joy to pledge them anew our
unfaltering devotion and our eternal love.