great applause, Mr. Dickens responded with the following address:]
GENTLEMEN, – If you had given this splendid entertainment to anyone
else in the whole wide world – if I were to-night to exult in the
triumph of my dearest friend – if I stood here upon my defence, to
repel any unjust attack – to appeal as a stranger to your
generosity and kindness as the freest people on the earth – I
could, putting some restraint upon myself, stand among you as selfpossessed
and unmoved as I should be alone in my own room in
England. But when I have the echoes of your cordial greeting
ringing in my ears; when I see your kind faces beaming a welcome so
warm and earnest as never man had – I feel, it is my nature, so
vanquished and subdued, that I have hardly fortitude enough to
thank you. If your President, instead of pouring forth that
delightful mixture of humour and pathos which you have just heard,
had been but a caustic, ill-natured man – if he had only been a
dull one – if I could only have doubted or distrusted him or you, I
should have had my wits at my fingers’ ends, and, using them, could
have held you at arm’s-length. But you have given me no such
opportunity; you take advantage of me in the tenderest point; you
give me no chance of playing at company, or holding you at a
distance, but flock about me like a host of brothers, and make this
place like home. Indeed, gentlemen, indeed, if it be natural and
allowable for each of us, on his own hearth, to express his
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Dickens, Charles – Speeches, Literary & Social
thoughts in the most homely fashion, and to appear in his plainest
garb, I have a fair claim upon you to let me do so to-night, for
you have made my home an Aladdin’s Palace. You fold so tenderly
within your breasts that common household lamp in which my feeble
fire is all enshrined, and at which my flickering torch is lighted
up, that straight my household gods take wing, and are transported
there. And whereas it is written of that fairy structure that it
never moved without two shocks – one when it rose, and one when it
settled down – I can say of mine that, however sharp a tug it took
to pluck it from its native ground, it struck at once an easy, and
a deep and lasting root into this soil; and loved it as its own. I
can say more of it, and say with truth, that long before it moved,
or had a chance of moving, its master – perhaps from some secret
sympathy between its timbers, and a certain stately tree that has
its being hereabout, and spreads its broad branches far and wide –
dreamed by day and night, for years, of setting foot upon this
shore, and breathing this pure air. And, trust me, gentlemen,
that, if I had wandered here, unknowing and unknown, I would – if I
know my own heart – have come with all my sympathies clustering as
richly about this land and people – with all my sense of justice as
keenly alive to their high claims on every man who loves God’s
image – with all my energies as fully bent on judging for myself,
and speaking out, and telling in my sphere the truth, as I do now,
when you rain down your welcomes on my head.
Our President has alluded to those writings which have been my
occupation for some years past; and you have received his allusions
in a manner which assures me – if I needed any such assurance –
that we are old friends in the spirit, and have been in close
communion for a long time.
It is not easy for a man to speak of his own books. I daresay that
few persons have been more interested in mine than I, and if it be
a general principle in nature that a lover’s love is blind, and
that a mother’s love is blind, I believe it may be said of an