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and our contempt for the cowardice manifested in attacking a man while confined to a bed of sickness; and we trust that Providence will speedily restore them to health and to their patriotic duties.

Mr. Parke Godwin, in seconding the resolutions, said:

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN: How grand and how glorious, yet how terrible the times in which we are permitted to live! How profound and various the emotions that alternately depress and thrill our hearts-like these April skies, now all smiles, and now all tears. Within a week-the Holy Week, as it is called in the rubrics of our churches-we have had our triumphal entries amid the waving of the palms of peace; we have had our dread Friday of crucifixion; we have had, too, in the recently renewed patriotism of the nation, a resurrection of a new and better life! [Sensation.]

It seems but a day or two since we listened to the music of the glad and festive parade; we saw the banners of our pride waving in beauty in every air, their stars bright as the stars of the morning, and their rays of white and red, like the beams of the rainbow, telling that the tempest was past. We pressed hands and hurrahed, and grew almost delirious with the joy that peace had come, that unity was secured, that liberty and justice, like the cherubim of the ark, would stretch their wings over the altars of our country, and stand forever as the guardian angels of her sanctity and glory. [Applause.]

But now these exultant strains are changed into the dull and heavy toll of bells; these flags are folded and draped in the emblems of mourning, and our hearts, giving forth no more the cheering shouts of victory, are despondent and full of sadness. The great captain of our cause, the commander-in-chief of our armies and navies, the President of our civic councils, the centre and director of movements-this true son of the people-once the poor flat-boatman, the village lawyer that was, the raw, uncouth, yet unsophisticated child of our American society and institutions, whom that society and those institutions had lifted out of his low estate to the foremost dignity of the world-ABRAHAM LINCOLN, Smitten by the basest hand ever upraised against human innocence, is gone, gone, gone! He, who had borne the heaviest of the brunt in our four long years of war; whose pulse beat livelier; whose eyes danced brighter than any others when

"The storm drew off,

In scattered thunders groaning round the hills,"

in the supreme hour of his joy and glory was struck down. That genial, kindly heart has ceased to beat; that noble brain has oozed from its mysterious beds; that manly form lies stiff in death's icy fetters, and all of him that was mortal has sunk "to the portion of weeds and out-worn faces." [Sensation.]

Our feelings are now too deep to ask or warrant any attempt at an analysis of the character of the services of the man whose loss we deplore. Standing

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over his bier, looking down almost into the tomb to which he must shortly be consigned, we are conscious only of our grief. We know that one who was great in himself, as well as by position, has suddenly departed. There is something startling, ghastly, awful, in the manner of his going off. But the chief poignancy of our distress is not for greatness fallen, but for the goodness lost. Presidents have died before; during this bloody war we have lost many eminent generals-Lyon, Baker, Kearney, Sedgwick, Mitchell, and others; we have lost lately our finest scholar, publicist, orator

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"That when he spoke,

The air, a chartered libertine, was still,

To steal his sweet and honeyed sentences."

Our hearts still bleed for the companions, friends, brothers, that sleep the sleep that knows no waking;" but no loss has been comparable to his who was our supremest leader, our safest counsellor, our wisest friend, our dear father.

Would you know what LINCOLN was? Look at this vast metropolis, covered with the habiliments of woe. Never in human history has there been so universal, so spontaneous, so profound an expression of a nation's bereavement. In all our churches, without distinction of sect; in all our journals, without distinction of party; in all our workshops, in all our counting-houses, from the stateliest mansion to the lowliest hovel, you hear but the one utterance--you see but the one emblem of sorrow. Why has the death of ABRAHAM LINCOLN taken such deep hold of every class? Partly, no doubt, because of the awful and atrocious method of his death; partly because he was our Chief Magistrate; but mainly, I think, because through all his public functions there shone the fact that he was a wise and good man; a kindly, honest, noble man; a man in whom the people recognized their own better qualities; whom they, whatever their political convictions, trusted; whom they respected; whom they loved; a man as pure of heart as patriotic of impulse-as patient, gentle, sweet, and lovely of nature as ever history lifted out of the sphere of the domestic affections to enshrine forever in the affections of the world. [Loud and continuous applause.]

Our chief has gone, has now become its

Yet we sorrow not as those who are without hope. but our cause remains, dearer to our hearts because he martyr; consecrated by his sacrifice; more widely accepted by all parties, and fragrant and lovely forevermore in the memories of all the good and the great of all lands, and for all time. The rebellion, which began in the blackest treachery, to be ended in the foulest assassination-for, as Shakspeare says,

this rebellion, accursed in its motive, which was to rivet the shackles of slavery on a whole race for all the future; accursed in its means, which have been "red

ruin and the breaking up of law," the overthrow of the mildest and blessedest of governments, and the profuse shedding of brothers' blood by brothers' hands; accursed in its accompaniments of violence, cruelty, and barbarism, is now doubly accursed in its final act of cold-blooded murder [Applause.]

Cold-blooded, but impotent, and defeated in its own purposes. The frenzied hand which slew the head of the government in the mad hope of paralyzing its functions, only drew the hearts of the people together more closely to strengthen and sustain its power. All the North once more, without party or division, clenches hands around the common altar; all the North swears a more earnest fidelity to freedom; all the North again presents its breasts as the living shield and bulwark of the nation's unity and life. Oh, foolish and wicked dream! oh, insanity of fanaticism! oh, blindness of black hate, to think that this majestic temple of human liberty, with its clustered columns of free and prosperous States, and whose base is as broad as the continent, could be shaken to pieces by striking off the ornaments of its capital! No; this nation lives, not in one man, nor in a hundred men, however eminent, however able, however endeared to us, but in the affections, the virtues, the energies, and the will of the whole American people. It has perpetual succession, not like a dynasty, in the line of its rulers, but in the line of its masses. They are always alive; they are always present to empower its acts, and to impart an unceasing vitality to its institutions. No maniac's blade, no traitor's bullet, shall ever penetrate that heart, for it is immortal, like the substance of Milton's angels, and can only "by annihilating die." [Applause.]

These sudden visitations of Providence, these mysterious and fearful vicissitudes in the destinies of nations and individuals, always seem to our short-sighted human wisdom as inscrutable; nor would it be less than presumption in any one to attempt to interpret the meaning of the Divine Mind in this late and most appalling affliction. God, as he passes, the Scriptures tell us, can only be seen from behind-can only be seen when events have gone by. Until then we grope in darkness; we guess at best but dimly; we more often muse in mere mute wonder and awe. Yet it is always permitted us to extract such good as we may from His seeming frowns and judgments. Thus I discern in the removal of Mr. LINCOLN, lamentable and horrible as it was in its circumstances, some reasons for a calm and hopeful submission to the Divine will. I can see how our nation is cemented by its tears into a more universal and affectionate brotherhood; I can see how the proclamation of freedom must become the eternal law of our hearts, if not of the land, through the martyrdom and canonization of its author; I can see how the atrocious crime of assassination must tear away from the rebellion every friend that it had left in the civilized world abroad; and I can see how the successor of Mr. LINCOLN, a southern man, known to the southern people by the fact of his origin and principles, not amenable to the prejudices knotted and gnarled about Mr. LINCOLN, shall under

mine the supremacy of the southern leaders, and reconcile the deluded masses more rapidly than any acts of amnesty or promises of forgiveness. [Cheers.]

But what impresses me most forcibly in all this business is the new demonstration that it has given of the inherent strength and elasticity of democratic government. We have conducted the most stupendous war ever undertaken-a war that involved the blockade of six thousand miles of seacoast, the defence of two thousand miles of frontier, the clearing and holding of the second largest river of the globe, and the occupation of a territory greater than all Europe, (without Russia,) not only energetically, but successfully. We have done it without abandoning, or vitiating, or dislocating any of our fundamental institutions; for in the midst of this gigantic convulsion, we carried on a political canvass and a presidential election as quietly as they choose a beadle or a churchwarden elsewhere; and now we have our principal men of office killed or disabled and the government goes on without a jar, and society moves in its appointed way without a ripple of outbreak or disorder. Oh, yes, Americans, our good ship of state, which the tempests assail with their wild fury, which the angry surges lift in their arms that they may drop her into the yawning gulf, which the treacherous hidden rocks below grind and torture, yet sails on securely to her destined port, and when the very prince of the power of the air smites her captain at the helm and the first mate in his berth,.she still sails on securely to her destined port, for her crew is still there; they know her bearings, and will steer right on by the compass of eternal justice and under the celestial light of liberty.

Mr. George D. Putnam sustained the resolutions as follows:

Mr. PRESIDENT: It may be presumptious, especially for one who has no power as a speaker, to add anything to the forcible remarks of the gentlemen who have already spoken. I would, with deference, merely refer to one or two thoughts which have been already expressed.

Mr. Godwin has well said that even in this overwhelming calamity, and amidst this deeply affecting spectacle of a great nation in tears for the loss of its loved and honored chief, we do not sorrow as those who have no hope. May it not be, sir, that the beneficent Ruler of the universe has permitted this heavy blow to be struck for his own wise and merciful purposes of permanent good to this nation; that this crowning bereavement, like many lesser disasters throughout the great struggle of these troublous and fruitful years, may prove to have been needful for our national salvation and national purification? May it not prove that there was danger of too much leniency and forbearance to traitors, and that God would teach us that justice must not be wholly superseded even by benignant mercy? Is not our new President right in saying that, in the present position of this nation, indulgence to leading traitors may be cruelty to the state?

:

For one, sir, I must confess a mortal repugnance to bloody revenge, and I believe the worst use you can make of a man is to hang him. I would give full force to all those considerations which are rightly urged against vindictive retaliation, even for the crimes of the authors and leaders of this foul rebellion. The spirit of our Saviour's teachings should govern this people as well as the law from Mount Sinai. But, sir, what can any one of us ask or expect of our government in disposing of the responsible leaders of the late audacious and wicked conspiracy against the life of a nation, the torturers and butchers of our prisoners, and the authors at least of the teachings which have prompted the attempt at midnight murder of thousands of peaceable women and children in our cities, and now the dastardly assassination of the great and good chief of the nation? Can we expect that these criminals (wherever the difficult line. may be drawn) shall suffer less than permanent expatriation from the land they have steeped in blood and covered with the graves of tens of thousands of martyrs to their unholy, selfish, reckless ambition?

If we say nothing of the shining marks-the nobler victims of the war itself the Elsworths, the Lowells, the Sedgwicks, the Winthrops, the Wadsworths-who have fallen in the field-can we again welcome to honorable citizenship the men who either directed or countenanced the doings at Fort Pillow, at Laurence, at Salisbury, and Andersonville?

Sir, we are glad to believe, whatever may have been previous impressions, that in our new President we have a man of nerve, of integrity, and of ability, who will not shrink from the duties devolving upon him; but will administer justice in no spirit of mean revenge, but as the executive agent of a great people, who have earned by their best blood the right, under God's blessing, of future security and permanent peace.

We are willing to believe that he, too, as well as his martyred predecessor, has been fitted by the Almighty, over and above all defects of education, or the personal associations of a slave State, for the momentous duties of the hour, upon which depends the future of this continent.

Glance back a few years, nay, a few months; the suggestions of experience, the wonderful teachings of Providence, which crowd upon us as we look at past events, would fill volumes. I do not presume to detain you; but just think of ABRAHAM LINCOLN, legally, rightfully chosen though he was for his high office, yet obliged to reach the capital almost as a fugitive, in disguise. Think of the then current jeers about “Old Abe, the rail-splitter," "the buffoon,” “the ape," not so called only by southern rebels, but openly in the streets of New York. Think of the amazing task which lay before this untried lawyer of a western village. Think of his difficulties and discouragements, not from open foes alone, but from professed friends, his own party supporters, almost deserting him as unequal to the crisis, and calling for a "dictator." Think of the fact that his wisdom and ability were thus doubted, not merely in the first year