yancy--an out-door air about them--which
give the reader a winning impression of Winthrop's personality. The
best of them is, perhaps, _Cecil Dreeme_, a romance that reminds one a
little of Hawthorne, and the scene of which is the New York University
building on Washington Square, a locality that has been further
celebrated in Henry James's novel of _Washington Square_.

Another member of this same Seventh Regiment, Fitz James O'Brien, an
Irishman by birth, who died at Baltimore in 1862 from the effects of a
wound received in a cavalry skirmish, had contributed to the magazines
a number of poems and of brilliant though fantastic tales, among which
the _Diamond Lens_ and _What Was It?_ had something of Edgar A. Poe's
quality. Another Irish-American, Charles G. Halpine, under the
pen-name of "Miles O'Reilly," wrote a good many clever ballads of the
war, partly serious and partly in comic brogue. Prose writers of note
furnished the magazines with narratives of their experience at the seat
of war, among papers of which kind may be mentioned Dr. Holmes's _My
Search for the Captain_, in the _Atlantic Monthly_, and Colonel T. W.
Higginson's _Army Life in a Black Regiment_, collected into a volume in
1870.

Of the public oratory of the war, the foremost example is the
ever-memorable address of Abraham Lincoln at the dedication of the
National Cemetery at Gettysburg. The war had brought the nation to its
intellectual majority. In the stress of that terrible fight there was
no room for buncombe and verbiage, such as the newspapers and
stump-speakers used to dole out in _ante bellum_ days. Lincoln's
speech is short--a few grave words which he turned aside for a moment
to speak in the midst of his task of saving the country. The speech is
simple, naked of figures, every sentence impressed with a sense of
responsibility for the work yet to be done and with a stern
determination to do it. "In a larger sense," it says, "we cannot
dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The
brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far
above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor
long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did
here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the
unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly
advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task
remaining before us;