Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PATRIOTISM OF THE SOUTH Mr, President, Ladies, and Gentlemen: When your honored invitation came it carried me in my thoughts to Virginia, to the Great Valley where I first saw the light. With the glamour of youth’s enchantment lingering yet a little, I saw old Virginia’s hills with the sunshine glorifying farm and village, mirroring itself in the bright waters, and clothing mountain and valley with wealth of green and gold. A vision came to me of the old Commonwealth as I remember it in my childhood. Again I saw her worn from battle-field and adversity, again I witnessed her sorrows, her sacrifices, her courage, her high honor, her glory, everything save dishonor. This fair valley still reverberated with the thunderous tread of the angel of the spear and the sword. Never since Alaric harried Italy and Gaul, never since Alva ravaged the Low Countries has the hand of fate held for a people such hard conditions. I wish to awaken no sad memories, for your faces are turned to the glory of the rising morning, not to the rays of the setting sun. Yet, in the pages of whatbook, from the broad field of what experience, can I better gather for you lessons of high resolve than from the heroic endeavor and exalted ideals with which our fathers and mothers crowned with unexampled grace this land of the South ? Here in this old State, my native land, under the portal of this hoary University, listening to the heartthrobs of those whose blood flows with mine, feeling the touch of unseen hands, and hearing the music of a voice tuned to the choir of the Blessed, I am surrounded by the tender memories of the days that are gone. An angel winged its way to our earth to find here the sweetest and best to take back to the radiance of Heaven. There was wafted on the sunshine the perfume o…