D: Every one likes a compliment. Thank you for yours
on my little notification speech, and on the recent inaugural
address. I expect the latter to wear as well as, perhaps better
than, anything I have produced; but I believe it is not immediately
popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a
difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it,
however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the
world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be told, and, as
whatever of humiliation there is in it falls most directly on
myself, I thought others might afford for me to tell it."

Nothing would have more amazed Mr. Lincoln than to hear himself called a
man of letters; but this age has produced few greater writers. Emerson
ranks him with Aesop; Montalembert commends his style as a model for the
imitation of princes. It is true that in his writings the range of
subjects is not great. He was chiefly concerned with the political
problems of the time, and the moral considerations involved in them. But
the range of treatment is remarkably wide, running from the wit, the gay
humor, the florid eloquence of his stump speeches, to the marvelous
sententiousness and brevity of the address at Gettysburg, and the
sustained and lofty grandeur of his second inaugural; while many of his
phrases have already passed into the daily speech of mankind.

A careful student of Mr. Lincoln's character will find this inaugural
address instinct with another meaning, which, very naturally, the
President's own comment did not touch. The eternal law of compensation,
which it declares and applies to the sin and fall of American slavery,
in a diction rivaling the fire and dignity of the old Hebrew prophecies,
may, without violent inference, be interpreted to foreshadow an
intention to renew at a fitting moment the brotherly goodwill gift to
the South which has already been treated of. Such an inference finds
strong corroboration in the sentences which closed the last public
address he ever made. On Tuesday evening, April 11, a considerable
assemblage of citizens of Washington gathered at the Executive Mansion
to celebrate the victory of Grant over Lee. The rather long and careful
speech which Mr. Lincoln made on that occasion was, however, less about
the past than the future. It discussed the subject of reconstruction as
illustrated in the case of Louisiana, showi