of consolation and joy than LINCOLN? His countrymen had
shown their love by choosing him to a second term of service. The
raging war that had divided the country had lulled, and private grief
was hushed by the grandeur of the result. The nation had its new birth
of freedom, soon to be secured forever by an amendment of the
Constitution. His persistent gentleness had conquered for him a
kindlier feeling on the part of the South. His scoffers among the
grandees of Europe began to do him honor. The laboring classes
everywhere saw in his advancement their own. All peoples sent him
their benedictions. And at this moment of the height of his fame, to
which his humility and modesty added charms, he fell by the hand of
the assassin, and the only triumph awarded him was the march to the
grave.

This is no time to say that human glory is but dust and ashes; that we
mortals are no more than shadows in pursuit of shadows. How mean a
thing were man if there were not that within him which is higher than
himself; if he could not master the illusions of sense, and discern
the connexions of events by a superior light which comes from God! He
so shares the divine impulses that he has power to subject ambition to
the ennoblement of his kind. Not in vain has LINCOLN lived, for he has
helped to make this republic an example of justice, with no caste but
the caste of humanity. The heroes who led our armies and ships into
battle and fell in the service--Lyon, McPherson, Reynolds, Sedgwick,
Wadsworth, Foote, Ward, with their compeers--did not die in vain; they
and the myriads of nameless martyrs, and he, the chief martyr, gave up
their lives willingly "that government of the people, by the people,
and for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

The assassination of LINCOLN, who was so free from malice, has, by
some mysterious influence, struck the country with solemn awe, and
hushed, instead of exciting, the passion for revenge. It seems as if
the just had died for the unjust. When I think of the friends I have
lost in this war--and every one who hears me has, like myself, lost
some of those whom he most loved--there is no consolation to be
derived from victims on the scaffold, or from anything but the
established union of the regenerated nation.

In his character LINCOLN was through and through an American. He is
the first native of the region west of the Alleghenies to attain to
the highest station; and how happy it is that the man