ment developed also, as exhibited in the
purity and perfection of his language and style of speech. The rough
backwoodsman, who had never seen the inside of a university, became in
the end, by self-training and the exercise of his own powers of mind,
heart, and soul, a master of style, and some of his utterances will rank
with the best, the most perfectly adapted to the occasion which produced
them.

Have you time to listen to his two-minutes speech at Gettysburg, at the
dedication of the Soldiers' Cemetery? His whole soul was in it:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a
great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived
and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of
that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final
resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might
live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But
in a larger sense 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 that from these honored dead we
take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full
measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall
not have died in vain--that this nation under God shall have a new birth
of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, and for
the people shall not perish from the earth."

He lived to see his work indorsed by an overwhelming majority of his
countrymen. In his second inaugural address, pronounced just forty days
before his death, there is a single passage which well displays his
indomitable will and at the same time his deep religious feeling,
his sublime charity to the enemies of his country, and his broad and
catholic humanity:

"If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offences
which in the Providence of God mus