The Rhode Island Republican

Domestic & Miscellaneous

From the Washington Journal.

To live with fame,
The Gods allow to many, but to die
With equal lustre, is a blessing Heaven
Selects from all the choicest boons of fate,
And with a sparing hand on few bestows.
Glover's Leonidas.

The sentiment so well expressed by the poet in the above lines, has received a new and beautiful illustration in the deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. To them Heaven has extended this choicest boon, to close their lives with a lustre equal to that which has, at any period, distinguished their career of active usefulness. They have fulfilled the common destiny, and descended to the common grave: but the cannon of 24 states saluted their spirits as they passed from time to eternity; and the swell of a nation's gratitude was the last sound which broke upon their dying ears. Imagination could not have conceived a more beautiful consummation of human glory. The annals of philosophy and of military heroism record no closing scene so full of hallowed splendor. There is none to which posterity will turn its glance with such wonder and admiration. Surpassing the fictions of poetry, this extraordinary coincidence of events must be handed down by the historian accompanied by the strongest evidence to rescue it from the scepticism of distant ages, and give to it the indisputable character of truth.

A single signer of the Declaration of Independence now only remains to connect that glorious band with posterity. A short time, and he must follow his compatriots. Would that his sun may also go down in equal glory! He stands among us majestic in his loneliness; a sublime relic of the virtue and patriotism of a past age, spared by time, that we may yet gaze on his venerable form a little longer, before we are called on to lay him with his brother sages in the tomb. Then we may gather the bones of all these patriarchs into one grave, and erect over it a mausoleum, on which might be written a challenge to all ages and climates of the world, to produce its rival in moral grandeur—to exhibit a tomb more pregnant with instruction in all the duties which render man estimable and useful to his fellow men.