ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 161 



should be very precious to us for its lesson. Talleyrand, 

 whose life may be compared with his for the strange 

 vicissitudes which it witnessed, carried with him out of the 

 world the respect of no man, least of all his own ; and how 

 many of our own public men have we seen whose old age 

 but accumulated a disregard which they would gladly have 

 exchanged for oblivion ! In Quincy the public fidelity was 

 loyal to the private, and the withdrawal of his old age was 

 into a sanctuary a diminution of publicity with addition 

 of influence. 



1 Conclude we, then, felicity consists 

 Not in exterior fortunes. . . . 

 Sacred felicity doth ne er extend 

 Beyond itself. . . . 

 The swelling of an outward fortune can 

 Create a prosperous, not a happy man.&quot; 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

 1864. 



THERE have been many painful crises since the impatient 

 vanity of South Carolina hurried ten prosperous Common 

 wealths 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 morning paper 

 without dreading to find that he had 110 longer a country to 

 love and honour. Whatever the result of the convulsion 

 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 

 reaped no longer ; that fine virtue which sent up messages 



