[From the Maryland Republican, of July 11.]
Inscrutible are the ways of providence! Gracious and wise and good are all his ordinances. It was strange almost beyond belief, that the author of the declaration of independence should live precisely to the day that he had so long wished to see, and at the sight of which, he made up his mind to exclaim: ‘Now let thy servant depart in peace, for his eyes hath seen thy salvation’—and that at that very hour he should be relieved from his earthly pilgrimage—that his spirit should be wafted as it were from earth towards heaven, by the United prayers of so many millions of people, spread over the wide land that he had contributed to make free and happy.—This was strange; but how is astonishment increased into awe at the strikingly providential coincidence, that not only one, but that two of the three surviving signers of the declaration of independence, that two of the Ex-Presidents of the United States should be called from works to rewards upon the same day, and that day the Jubilee anniversary of the existence of the nation, they had united in pledging life, property, and sacred honor, to emancipate. Thomas Jefferson died at Monticello, in Virginia, at a few moments before one o’clock, on the 4th July, 1826, and John Adams, his fellow laborer, in the arduous struggle of the revolution, expired four hours after, at Quincy, in Massachusetts. Did we desire that the fiftieth anniversary of the Republic should be distinguished by some striking incident? Nothing so sublime could have been conceived by human thought, as that which has become history. There is something indescribably and awfully grand in this dispensation.