and the respective husbands and wives looked confidently into the faces of their partners, and gave their promises with unaffected candor and honest avowal; and that ruddy beam that illuminated their faces only represented and reflected the still happier and brighter light that beamed in hope and confidence on their faith and their hearts in permanent warmth and devotion.
“Trebly happy as this celebration is,” said Prokop, when all were seated,” and ardently as I pray for multiplied blessings on our loved friends, it presents still, another feature that confers on this marriage in each case a peculiar significance. We see our native land again recovering from dreadful calamities. Her fair surface betokens the renewed assiduity, of her children.
“In this hall, you, my younger friends, may hope to see again the glory of former days. But the old is passing away. We have seen assembled here representatives of chivalry, national welcome to commercial enterprise, and also the ethical recollection and continuance of the faith of departed centuries. Two of these representatives we have seen perish before our eyes. The third, however feeble, still survives. So fades the greatness, the national glory of Bohemia Lingers still in quiet scenes much of the old and cherished belief of our fathers. It will almost disappear; it will be obscured; in its quietness will it be overlooked?
“But beneath the mass of new and ambitious vegetation that marks the successive growths of the forest
