as the anguish a moment tells,--
The passionate sorrow Death quickly knells;
But the wearing wash of a lifelong woe
Is left for the desolate heart to know,
Whose tides with the dull years come and go,
Till hope drifts dead to its stagnant brim,
Thinking of him.

ASSASSINATION.

The assassination of President Lincoln threw a whole nation into
mourning,--the few exceptions to those who deplored the President's
violent and untimely end only serving to make the general regret the
more manifest. Of all our Presidents since Washington, Mr. Lincoln had
excited the smallest amount of that feeling which places its object in
personal danger. He was a man who made a singularly favorable impression
on those who approached him, resembling in that respect President
Jackson, who often made warm friends of bitter foes, when circumstances
had forced them to seek his presence; and it is probable, that, if he
and the honest chiefs of the Rebels could have been brought face to
face, there never would have been civil war,--at least, any contest of
grand proportions; for he would not have failed to convince them that
all that they had any right to claim, and therefore all that they could
expect their fellow-citizens to fight for would be more secure under his
government than it had been under the governments of such men as Pierce
and Buchanan, who made use of sectionalism and slavery to promote the
selfish interests of themselves and their party. The estimation in which
he was latterly held by the most intelligent of the Secessionists
indicates, that, had they been acquainted with him, their Secessionism
never would have got beyond the nullification of the Palmetto
Nullifiers; and that was all fury and fuss, without any fighting in it.
Ignorance was the parent of the civil war, as it has been the parent of
many other evils,--ignorance of the character and purpose of the man who
was chosen President in 1860-61, and who entered upon official life with
less animosity toward his opponents than ever before or since had been
felt by a man elected to a great place after a bitter and exciting
contest. There is not the slightest reason for doubting the sincerity of
Mr. Lincoln's declaration, that his administration should be
Constitutional in its character; nor can it be said that the earlier
Rebels ever supposed that he would invade their Constitutional rights.
They rebelled because circumstances enabled