His practical wisdom made him the wonder of all lands With such certainty did Mr. Lincoln follow causes to their ultimate effects, that his foresight of contingencies seemed almost prophetic. While we in turn were calling him weak and stubborn and blind, Europe was amazed at his statesmanship, and awed into silence by the grandeur of his plans. Measured by what he did, Mr. Lincoln is a statesman without a peer. He stands alone in the world. He came to the government by a minority vote. Without an army, without a navy, without money, without munitions, he stepped into the midst of the most stupendous, most wide-spread, most thoroughly equipped and appointed, most deeply planned and infamous rebellion of all history. He stamped upon the earth, and two millions of armed men leaped forwardHe spoke to the sea, and the mightiest navy the world ever saw crowned every wave. He breathed into the air, and money and munitions rained upon the people. Taken all and in all, he rises head and shoulders above every other man of six thousand years. I would not pluck one laurel from the statues of the noble dead; I would rather place in their midst another statue that shall adorn and honor their glorified company. We are, indeed, too near Mr. Lincoln to award him the glory he deserves. We remember too well his long, lank form, his awkward movements, to realize that this man, standing among us like a father, yet looms above us like a monarch. I turn to the past; I see behind me a noble company. There is Napoleon, the man of destiny. Armies move at his bid as if they were the muscles of his body; kings rise and fall at his nod; but he lived for himself. His entire life was a failure. He did not accomplish one of his great purposes. I see a Wellington; great as a military chieftain, competent to command armies against a foreign and hereditary foe. I see Mariborough; but on every stone of his monument and in every page of his history I see the frauds by which he enriched himself from the plunder of his country. There is Cromwell-a fine old man, England's noblest son; but his arena was small, the work he undertook limited, the work he accomplished ephemeral. The revolution from the hereditary kingdom of the Stuarts to the hereditary dictatorship of the Cromwells was not so great as the change from executing the Fugitive Slave Law in Boston to the Constitutional Emancipation of the slave in Maryland. Yet upon his death the Government reverted to the Stuarts. But upon the death of Abraham Lincoln, freedom rears a monument, and for new conquests marches boldly into the future. I do see a Cæsar yonder; but his power is the purchase of fraud and crime, and falls about his grave like withered weeds. And away down yonder in the dark vortex of history, looking out upon the centuries, is old Pericles. But the thirty thousand citizens of Athens are lost in some inland town of America, with her thirty millions of citizens. There are many noble heroes who illumine the darkness behind us with the radiance of some single virtue; but among them all I see no Lincoln. He is radiant with all the great virtues, and his memory shall shed a glory upon this age that shall fill the eyes of men as they look into history. An administrator, he saved the nation in the perils of unparalleled civil war. A statesman, he justified his measures by their success. A philanthropist, he gave liberty to one race and salvation to another. A moralist, he bowed from the summit of human power to the foot of the cross, and became a Christian. A mediator, he exercised mercy under the most absolute abeyance to law. A leader, he was no partisan. A commander, he was untainted with blood. A ruler in desperate times, he was unsullied with crime. A man, he has left no word of passion, no thought of malice, no trick of craft, no act of jealousy, no purpose of selfish ambition. Thus perfected, without a model and without a peer, he was dropped into these troubled years to adorn and embellish all that is good and all that is great in our humanity, and to present to all coming time the representative of the divine idea of Free Govern ment. It is not too much to say that away down in the future, when the Republic has fallen from its niche in the wall of time; when the great war itself shall have faded out in the distance like a mist on the horizon; when the Anglo-Saxon language shall be handed only by the tongue of the stranger; then the generations looking this way shall see the great President as the supreme figure in this vortex of history. NEXT MORNING. Ten o'clock! Well, I'm sure I can't help it' I'm up-go away from the door! Now, children, I'll speak to your mother If you pound there like that any more. I wish I'd not danced quite so often- If you have a place left on your card. It's a shame that I've spotted it so- That shade looks so lovely with white. Dear! where is Marie?-how it rains!- I do wonder what is the reason, That good men are all like Joe Price, Just see how Joe acted last evening! I didn't care two pins to do it; But Joe said I musn't,-and so I just did--he isn't my master, Nor shan't be, I'd like him to know. I don't think he looked at me even, And I'd saved him three elegant dances, I did think that Joe had some sense once And the way that I've gone on about him,- Only wait till the next time I see him, Quick, Marie, and do up my hair! Not that bow-the green one-Joe likes it― ZARA'S EAR-RINGS. 'My ear-rings! my ear-rings! they've dropped into the well, And what to say to Muça, I cannot, cannot tell." 'Twas thus, Granada's fountain by, spoke Albuharez' daughter. To me did Muça give them, when he spake his sad farewell; But remember he my lips had kissed, pure as those ear-rings When he comes back, and hears that I have dropped them in the well, Oh! what will Muça think of me, I cannot, cannot tell! f "My ear-rings! my ear-rings! he'll say they should have been Not of pearl and of silver, but of gold and glittering sheen, noosed, From the ears where he had placed them my rings of pearl unloosed. He'll think, when I was sporting so beside this marble well, "He'll say I am a woman, and we are all the same; "I'll tell the truth to Muça, and I hope he will believe And that deep his love lies in my heart, as they lie in the well!" |