nine o'clock on the morning of May 3. Nothing had
been done or thought of for two weeks in Springfield but the
preparations for this day, and they had been made with a thoroughness
which surprised the visitors from the East. The body lay in state in the
Capitol, which was richly draped from roof to basement in black velvet
and silver fringe. Within it was a bower of bloom and fragrance. For
twenty-four hours an unbroken stream of people passed through, bidding
their friend and neighbor welcome home and farewell; and at ten o'clock
on May 4, the coffin lid was closed, and a vast procession moved out to
Oak Ridge, where the town had set apart a lovely spot for his grave, and
where the dead President was committed to the soil of the State which
had so loved and honored him. The ceremonies at the grave were simple
and touching. Bishop Simpson delivered a pathetic oration; prayers were
offered and hymns were sung; but the weightiest and most eloquent words
uttered anywhere that day were those of the second inaugural, which the
committee had wisely ordained to be read over his grave, as the friends
of Raphael chose the incomparable canvas of the Transfiguration to be
the chief ornament of his funeral.

XXXVIII

Lincoln's Early Environment--Its Effect on his Character--His Attitude
toward Slavery and the Slaveholder--His Schooling in Disappointment--His
Seeming Failures--His Real Successes--The Final Trial--His
Achievements--His Place in History

A child born to an inheritance of want; a boy growing into a narrow
world of ignorance; a youth taking up the burden of coarse manual labor;
a man entering on the doubtful struggle of a local backwoods
career--these were the beginnings of Abraham Lincoln, if we analyze them
under the hard practical cynical philosophy which takes for its motto
that "nothing succeeds but success." If, however, we adopt a broader
philosophy, and apply the more generous and more universal principle
that "everything succeeds which attacks favorable opportunity with
fitting endeavor," then we see that it was the strong vitality, the
active intelligence, and the indefinable psychological law of moral
growth that assimilates the good and rejects the bad, which Nature gave
this obscure child, that carried him to the service of mankind and to
the admiration of the centuries with the same certainty with which the
acorn grows to be the oak.

We see how even the limitations of his environment helped th