Cæsar in the Ides of March, saying to him, 'You have lived!'

"Have lived! Yes, Lincoln did live once, in the body; and thank God, who hath made man immortal, he liveth still. He lives! He lives! He lives to-day in his imperishable example, in his recorded words of wisdom, in his great maxims of liberty and enfranchisement.

"The good never die; to them belongs endurable immortality; they perish not upon the earth, and they exist forever in heaven. The good of the present live in the future, as the good of the past are here with us and in us to-day. The great primeval lawgiver, entombed for forty centuries in that unknown grave in an obscure vale of Moab, to-day legislates in your halls of state, and preaches on all your sabbaths in your synagogues. Sa lem's royal singer indites our liturgies, and leads our worship. Socrates questions atheists in these streets. Phidias sculptures the friezes of Christian temples; the desecrated tongue of mangled Tully arraigns our Catilines; against the Philip of to-day the dead Demosthenes thunders; the dead Leonidas guards the gates of every empire which wrestles for its sovereignty; the dead Justinian issues in your country the living mandates of the law; the dead Martin Luther issues from your press the living oracles of God; the dead Napoleon sways France from that silent throne in the Invalides; the dead George Washington held together through wrangling decades this brotherhood of States; and the dead ABRAHAM LINCOLN will peal the clarion of belea gured nations, and marshal and beckon on the wavering battle line of liberty till the last generation of man

'Shall creation's death behold

As Adam saw her prime.'

His fame will grow brighter and grander as it descends the ages, and posterity will regard him as the incarnation of democracy in its pure childhood, as the embodiment of those ideas of universal emancipation which were the glory of its faithful epoch.

"When the race shall have finally climbed to the lofty table-land of UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD, to which it is inevitably destined by the paramount law of its own development, and shall turn backward its wistful eye for those who have led its weary pilgrimage through passes the most perilous, and over wastes the most disheartening, they will instinctively seek the uncourtly figure of that forest-born LIBERATOR, who by one glorious edict restored to humanity all the divine equalities enfeoffed upon it when of one blood all the children of men were made, and thus incorporated into harmonious fraternity all the estranged and repellent complexions of mankind. With reverent and grateful hearts they will pour their choicest frankincense at his feet, crown with unfailing amaranth the brow, and by eulogy, statue, column, and obelisk, and every aid to enduring remembrance, transmit to new and ever-rising futurities the irradiated name, of the first President of the regenerated Republic, that martyr to liberty and law, whom on this shore and border of time's immensity we deplore to-day,— ABRAHAM LINCOLN."*

God gave this man, whom we "delight to honor," to the world for a high and holy work: God has taken him up to the society of the sin-freed and rejoicing ones of all nations and of all time, when he had accomplished his mission; and every loyal and every Christian heart must add, "Blessed be the name of the Lord!"

Hon. H. C. Deming

CHAPTER XIII.

SELECTIONS FROM SPEECHES AND LETTERS.

BORN, 1809; DIED, 1865, AGED 56.-CAPTAIN IN THE BLACK HAWK WAR.- ELECTED TO THE ILLINOIS STATE LEGISLATURE, 1834. — AGAIN, 1836. — ADMITTED TO THE BAR, 1837.-ELECTED TO CONGRESS, 1846.- MEMBER OF THE COMMITTEE ON POST-OFFICES AND POST-ROADS AND WAR-DEPARTMENT EXPENSES.-MADE HIS FIRST SPEECH IN CONGRESS, JAN. 12, 1848, IN OPPOSITION TO THE MEXICAN WAR.-SPEECH IN COOPER'S INSTITUTE, NEW YORK CITY, 1860.-PRESIDENT, 1860-1865.

["He is the author of a multitude of good sayings, so disguised as pleasantries that it is certain they had no reputation at first but as jests; and only later by the very acceptance and adoption they find in the mouths of millions, turn out to be the wisdom of the hour. I am sure if this man had ruled in a period of less facility of printing, he would have become mythological in a very few years, like Æsop or Pilpay, or one of the Seven Wise Masters, by his fables and proverbs.

"But the weight and penetration of many passages in his letters, messages, and speeches, hidden now by the very closeness of their application to the moment, are destined hereafter to a wide fame. What pregnant definitions! what unerring com

mon-sense! what foresight! and, on great occasions, what lofty, and, more than national, what humane tone.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson.

How his quaint wit made home-truth

seem more true. London Punch.]

[From a Lecture before the Springfield Lyceum, on the Perpetuation of our Free Institutions, January, 1837.]

..... At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

[Letter to Mr. Herndon.]*

WASHINGTON, February 1, 1848.

That vote affirms that the [Mexican] war was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the President; and I will stake my life, that, if you had been in my place, you would have voted just as I did. Would you have voted what you felt and knew to be a lie? I know you would not. Would you have gone out of the House, skulked the vote? I expect not. If you had skulked one vote, you would have to

· Mr. Lincoln voted for Mr. Ashmun's amendment.

t

skulk many more before the end of the session. Richardson's resolutions, introduced before I made any move, or gave any vote upon the subject, make the direct question of the justice of the war; so that no man can be silent if he would. You are compelled to speak; and your only alternative is to tell the truth or tell a lie.

[To the Same.]

WASHINGTON, July 10, 1848.

.. The way for a young man to rise is to improve himself every way he can, never suspecting that anybody wishes to hinder him. Allow me to assure you that suspicion and jealousy never did help any man in any situation. There may sometimes be ungenerous attempts to keep a young man down; and they will succeed, too, if he allows his mind to be diverted from its true channel, to brood over the attempted injury. Cast about, and see if this feeling has not injured every person you have ever known to fall into it.

[From a Speech in Congress, July 27, 1848.]

The other day one of the gentlemen from Georgia, an eloquent man, and a man of learning, so far as I could judge, not being learned myself, came down upon us astonishingly. He spoke in what the Baltimore American calls the "scathing and withering style." At the end of his second