strictly logical, and to this end carried with
him as he rode the legal circuit not law-books, but a copy of Euclid's
geometry, and passed his time on the way demonstrating to his drivers
the theorems therein proposed. "Demonstrate" he said he considered to
be the greatest word in the English language. He constructed every one
of his later speeches on the plan of a Euclidean solution. His Cooper
Union speech on "Slavery as the Fathers Viewed It," which contributed
so largely to his Presidential nomination, was such a demonstration,
settling what was thereafter never attempted to be controverted: his
contention that the makers of the Constitution merely tolerated
property in human flesh and blood as a primitive and passing phase of
civilization, and never intended that it should be perpetuated by the
charter of the Republic.

So, too, the Gettysburg speech, brief as it is, is the statement of a
thesis, the principles upon which the Fathers founded the nation, and
of the heroic demonstration of the same by the soldiers fallen on the
field, and the addition of a moral corollary of this, the high resolve
of the living to prosecute the work until the vision of the Fathers
was realized.

In substance of thought and in form of its presentation the speech is
as perfect a poem as ever was written, and even in the minor qualities
of artistic language--rhythm and cadence, phonetic euphony, rhetorical
symbolism, and that subtle reminiscence of a great literary and
spiritual inheritance, the Bible, which stands to us as Homer did to
the ancients--it excels the finest gem to be found in poetic cabinets
from the Greek Anthology downward. Only because it was not written in
the typography of verse, with capitalized and paragraphed initial
words at the beginning of each thought-group of words, has it failed
of recognition as a poem by academic minds. Had Walt Whitman composed
the address, and printed it in the above manner, it would now appear
in every anthology of poetry published since its date. To convince of
this those conventional people who must have an ocular demonstration
of form in order to compare the address with accepted examples of
poetry, I will dare to incur the condemnation of those who rightly
look upon such a departure from Lincoln's own manner of writing the
speech as profanation, and present it in the shape of _vers libre_.
For the latter class of readers this, the greatest poem by Lincoln,
the greatest, indeed, ye