this day of public mourning to be either formal or heartless. If, for a moment, it subsides amidst the busy and crowding scenes of the present, we have but to touch the chords of our hearts with that sacred and venerable name - the name of Abraham Lincoln -to make them vibrate through all our frames, and awaken anew the sorrow and terror which crushed us all, when the sad intelligence flashed upon us, that he who bore it, our high and illustrious Chief, was DEAD.

Gather we then again to-day, as it were, around his bier. We surround ourselves afresh with the signs of woe which then overspread the land. We hear once more the voice of wailing and lamentation; and behold the mourners as they go about the streets, and bear his body to its burial.

The grave has indeed closed upon him; but he is buried, not alone in the bosom of the earth, but in the bosoms of the people that he ruled; and there they will ever bring fresh flowers to adorn his tomb, the flowers of affection, and of loving sorrow that he is no more. He is gone from among us; the judgment of the Lord, which is "true and righteous altogether," has removed him from our sight: but he still lives in the virtues that adorned his life; in the works that he has wrought; in the memorial that will be raised up (ever, we trust, to remain); in the regeneration, in part at least, by that life and those deeds, of the nation's character, and in the higher exaltation of its destiny.

Many heroes have fallen, many great ones have been taken from us, but we have never seen - the world has never seen such a day as this; when, in all the homes of a great land, there will be felt a mourning "as if for an only son;" when in all its temples one voice will go up, of heartfelt bewailing for the sins which made such a judgment necessary, of tearful remembrance for the dead, and of grateful thanksgiving that such a life was lent us, to do its work, and to shed forth its light.

Is it for the departure of a great statesman that we mourn, and make our solemn confessions to Almighty God? Is it that a Chief Magistrate of our Republic was cut off in the midst of his honors and his work? For these, indeed; but not for these alone. Rather, because the friend and father of his people has been slain, and left them as bereaved children around his tomb. It was not pride in lofty genius that was humbled in that stroke. It was not confidence in eminent leadership that was tried by it. But it was affection, evoked by all that was generous and wise and patient in a life that a nation called its own, and which was consecrated to its welfare. Nothing but wounded affection could have drawn forth such tears from eyes all unused to weep. A voice which comes to us from a foreign land is but the echo of a universal one at home, "That man has lived himself wonderfully into my heart." The mourning of America for her Chief is only such as could be called out by that sublime devotion to his country, which we know as patriotism, a word of whose true use we had almost lost sight till he arose; who, casting away all selfishness, embarked himself, with all the powers of head and heart that God had given him, in his country's cause, for the redemption of that high pledge of duty which, before God and men, he had pronounced.

Born in lowliness, and reared amidst the rude blasts of adversity, this man had just such a training as fitted him for the place and the crisis he was to fill. A more refined life, or one more absorbed in intellectual pursuits, might have enervated too much a frame upon which such gigantic labors were to be imposed. A gentler birth and rearing might have equally unfitted him for that peculiar position which he assumed as the people's representative. A previous condition more elevated and commanding might have unfitted him for becoming, as he was, the popular mouth-piece; following, rather than leading, sentiment; himself taking shape

from, rather than giving shape to, the popular mind and will: but, when he had received it, giving it that expression in words which is ever the mark of genius; saying that which all felt, when said, they might have said as well as he, but which a common mind never could: for his was an intellect, if not of the highest order, yet, as we now look back upon it, truly great. See how his utterances stand out, stamped with his own pure individuality. In all of them, there was nothing re-echoed of other men; nothing commonplace; no mere platitudes, conveyed in pompous terms, such as too often form the staple of our public deliverances. His words went right to the mark, as winged arrows. With him, logic was almost an intuition; his thoughts naturally arranging themselves with the clearness and compactness of a syllogism. Just such a mind he had, as, with strong native powers, had grown through its own unaided efforts, by self-revolving thought, and by the massing within itself of its own strong convictions. We can fancy this mind ever educating itself; bringing into form and order, and strengthening, what God had given it, or when he plied the oar, or swung the axe, or, admitted to the councils of his fellows, labored for the truth, and by patient effort sought after it till he found it. By such training, not so much in books, as through patient thought, and deeply wrought conviction, he reached that culture which, through four long years, gave us so much sententious wisdom and practical truth, and which flowered at length in that second Inaugural, which men abroad have styled the finest State-paper that was ever written, and some of whose sentences are worthy to be copied in gold, and emblazoned on every temple of liberty, and every house of justice, throughout the world.

But such a mind as his could never be separated from his moral qualities. They helped to make the intellect. One may be a great poet, though a bad man. He may be an acute and profound philosopher. But he whose intellectual greatness lies

mainly in his judgment, in his practical wisdom, and in his personal power with men, must have moral qualities of the highest order. And so, in the character of this man, we find the calmest integrity, the most transparent sincerity, temperance, and righteousness, patience unbounded, the fortitude and gentleness of woman. From first to last, in that career which came so conspicuously before the world, there was nothing in which even his enemies could say that he was mean or crooked or unjust or hard or selfish. And, as these were religion practised, so, in all the documents issuing from his pen, we find it expressed; there being hardly one of them in which we do not discern the declaration of his dependence upon God, and the recognition of his obligation to him. We are not surprised, therefore, to learn that he was a man of daily prayer and perusal of God's Word; we are not surprised to be informed that such convictions had found their true centre in the cross of Christ. For four years he stood the foremost man in all the nation before the public eye, before the eye of the world; yet in all that time nothing could be found that would arraign the conclusion, that he was what "the Rock of Israel" so long ago declared a ruler should be,-" just, and ruling in the fear of God." Is this the language of mere eulogy? It seems like it. But you know that it is not. Whatever might have been his policy, in which some may have differed from him, and even in that the logic of events has brought us to see that what we might have thought error was the highest truth, in the spirit with which he ruled, we cannot detect the slightest flaw; so that to him is justly applicable the praise of Divine Wisdom: "He shall be as the light of the morning when the sun riseth, even a morning without clouds; as the tender grass springing out of the earth by clear shining after rain," a pure, unbroken light; a verdure bright and fresh. If this were the judgment of America alone, we might think it partial and overdrawn. But when, even

in the great cities of the Old World, men stopped their business, and held their breath at his cruel assassination, and then only relieved themselves by the utterance and re-utterance of his distinguished merits, asserting that no event in history had called forth such deep and genuine feeling, we may well believe that it was so; that in the man that we have lost there was an assemblage of virtues which rarely falls to the lot of rulers, and in whose possession immortality is secured. And when Americans venture to name him with Washington, -that hitherto unapproachable name to us,-we see the height to which their estimation of him has reached, a height from which we cannot perceive that he will ever descend. Washington, the first in his country born; Lincoln, the first in his country new-born, regenerated in a purer life, and for a nobler destiny. All that I would say is so well, though at times roughly, expressed by one who was aforetime his detractor, whose wit and sarcasm are world-wide in their reputation, that I cannot forbear repeating it here:—

Ever had laid on head and heart and hand

As one who knows where there's a task to do,

Man's honest will must Heaven's good grace command;

Who trusts the strength will with the burden grow;

That God makes instruments to work his will,

If but that will we can arrive to know,

Nor tamper with the weights of good and ill.

So he went forth to battle, on the side

That he felt clear was Liberty's and Right's;

As in his pleasant boyhood he had plied

His warfare with rude Nature's thwarting mights, —