expressions of popular feeling, no such
scene had ever been witnessed. On the afternoon appointed for the
procession to move Westward, all business was suspended, and the grief
of New York found utterance in Union Square before a great concourse of
people in a funeral oration by the historian Bancroft and in an elegiac
ode by William Cullen Bryant.

Similar scenes were witnessed in the great cities along the entire
route. Final obsequies were celebrated in Oakridge Cemetery near
Springfield on the fourth day of May. Major-General Joseph Hooker
acted as chief marshal upon the occasion, and an impressive sermon was
pronounced by Bishop Simpson of the Methodist-Episcopal church.
Perhaps in the history of the world no such outpouring of the people,
no such exhibition of deep feeling, had ever been witnessed as on this
funeral march from the National Capital to the capital of Illinois.
The pomp with which sovereigns and nobles are interred is often formal
rather than emotional, attaching to the rank rather than to the person.
Louis Philippe appealed to the sympathy of France when he brought the
body of the Emperor Napoleon from St. Helena twenty years after his
death; but the popular feeling among the French was chiefly displayed
in connection with the elaborate rites which attended the transfer of
the dead hero to the _Invalides_, where the shattered remains of his
valiant and once conquering legions formed for the last time around
him. Twelve years later the victorious rival by whom the imperial
warrior was at last overcome, received from the populace of London, as
well as from the crown, the peers, and the commons of England, the
heartiest tribute that Britons ever paid to human greatness.

The splendor of the ceremonials which aggrandize living royalty as much
as they glorify dead heroism, was wholly wanting in the obsequies of
Mr. Lincoln. No part was taken by the Government except the provision
of a suitable military escort. All beyond was the spontaneous movement
of the people. For seventeen hundred miles, through eight great States
of the Union whose population was not less than fifteen millions, an
almost continuous procession of mourners attended the remains of the
beloved President. There was no pageantry save their presence. There
was no tribute but their tears. They bowed before the bier of him who
had ben prophet, priest, and king to his people, who had struck the
shackles from the slave, who had ta