So it should be and will be this crackling day. But in his always solemn vision, and even more solemn understanding of the human condition, Mr. Adams, always the realist, had to add: "You will think me transported with enthusiasm, but I am not. I am well aware of the toil, and blood, and treasure, that it will cost us to maintain this declaration, and support and defend these States."

Mr. Adams' stoic awareness comes and goes in American history. Today, some 232 years after he wrote those cautionary words to the intimate he held dearest in the world, we forget.

We forget that it is the gift outright that comes at the highest price. Robert Frost did not. In another poem, "The Black Cottage," Frost he wrote of the New England widow of a different century who understood that the war of her time had also been fought to redeem the simple words of the Declaration about all men being created equal. Hers will seem a naive belief to the sophisticates of this or any time, yet she clung to it with the obduracy of innocence:

One wasn't long in learning that she thought
Whatever else the Civil War was for
It wasn't just to keep the States together,
Nor just to free the slaves, though it did both.
She wouldn't have believed those ends enough
To have given outright for them all she gave.
Her giving somehow touched the principle
That all men are created free and equal.
And to hear her quaint phrases - so removed
From the world's view to-day of all those things. . . .
Strange how such innocence gets its own way.
I shouldn't be surprised if in this world
It were the force that would at last prevail.

What a naive, simple American faith, and yet the poet understood that its force cannot be denied, not even after 232 years. But why hold onto it in these uncertain times, when retreat is as appealing as it always is when the realization dawns that freedom comes with a price. Robert Frost's response:

. . . why abandon a belief
Merely because it ceases to be true.
Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt
It will turn true again, for so it goes.
Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favor.

What is the Fourth of July? It's the day not only for Whitmanesque fireworks that rise and fade in a minute, but Frost's unblinking, everlasting patience. It is the day we rededicate ourselves to those truths we keep coming back to, especially when they are out of favor.