Panegyric, fluent in long-stifled praise, performs its office.

The army and the navy pay conventional honors, with the pomp of national woe, and then the hearse moves onward.
It rests appropriately, on its way, in the hall where independence was proclaimed, and again under the dome where freedom was born.

At length the tomb of JOHN ADAMS opens to receive a SON, who also, born a subject of a king had stood as a representative of his emancipated country, before principalities and powers, and had won by merit, and worn without reproach, the honors of the Republic.
From that scene, so impressive in itself, and impressive because it never before happened, and can never happen again, we have come up to this place surrounded with the decent drapery of public mourning, on a day set apart by authority, to recite the history of the citizen, who, in the ripeness of age, and fulness of honors, has thus descended to his rest.

It is fit to do so, because it is by such exercises that nations regenerate their early virtues and renew their constitutions.

All nations must perpetually renovate their virtues and their constitutions, or perish.