114 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



events, such living conceptions of character, we find nowhere 

 else in prose. The figures of most historians seem like dolls 

 stuffed with bran, whose whole substance runs out through 

 any hole that criticism may tear in them ; but Carlyle s are 

 so real in comparison, that, if you prick them, they bleed. 

 He seems a little wearied, here and there, in his Friedrich, 

 with the multiplicity of detail, and does his filling-in rather 

 shabbily ; but he still remains in his own way, like his hero, 

 the Only, and such episodes as that of Voltaire would make 

 the fortune of any other writer. Though not the safest of 

 guides in politics or practical philosophy, his value as an 

 inspirer and awakener cannot be over-estimated. It is a 

 power which belongs only to the highest order of minds, for 

 it is none but a divine fire that can so kindle and irradiate. 

 The debt due him from those who listened to the teachings 

 of his prime for revealing to them what sublime reserves of 

 power even the humblest may find in manliness, sincerity, 

 and self-reliance, can be paid with nothing short of reveren 

 tial gratitude. As a purifier of the sources whence our in 

 tellectual inspiration is drawn, his influence has been second 

 only to that of Wordsworth, if even to his. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

 1864. 



I ^HERE have been many painful crises since the im- 

 JL patient vanity of South Carolina hurried ten prosperous 

 Commonwealths into a crime whose assured retribution was 

 to leave them either at the mercy of the nation they had 

 wronged, or of the anarchy they had summoned but could 

 not control, when no thoughtful American opened his morn 

 ing paper without dreading to find that he had no longer a 

 country to love and honour. Whatever the result of the con 

 vulsion whose first shocks were beginning to be felt, there 

 would still be enough square miles of earth for elbow-room ; 

 but that ineffable sentiment made up of memory and hope, 

 of instinct and tradition, which swells every man s heart and 

 shapes his thought, though perhaps never present to his 

 consciousness, would be gone from it, leaving it common 

 earth and nothing more. Men might gather rich crops from 

 it, but that ideal harvest of priceless associations would be 



