longed to some one in chief: this belonged to all. It was each and every man's. Every virtuous household in the land felt as if its firstborn were gone. Men were bereaved, and walked for days as if a corpse lay unburied in their dwellings. There was nothing else to think of. They could speak of nothing but that; and yet, of that they could speak only falteringly. All business was laid aside. Pleasure forgot to smile. The city for nearly a week ceased to roar. The great Leviathan lay down, and was still. Even avarice stood still, and greed was strangely moved to generous sympathy and universal sorrow. Rear to his name monuments, found charitable institutions, and write his name above their lintels; but no monument will ever equal the universal, spontaneous, and sublime sorrow that in a moment swept down lines and parties, and covered up animosities, and in an hour brought a divided people into unity of grief and indivisible fellowship of anguish.

For myself, I cannot yet command that quietness of spirit needed for a just and temperate delineation of a man whom goodness has made great. Leaving that, if it please God, to some other occasion, I pass to some considerations, aside from the martyr President's character, which may be fit for this hour's instruction.

1. Let us not mourn that his departure was so sudden, nor fill our imagination with horror at its method. Men, long eluding and evading sorrow, when at last they are overtaken by it, seem enchanted, and seek to make their sorrow sorrowful to the very uttermost, and to bring out every drop of suffering which they possibly can. This is not Christian, though it may be natural. When good men pray for deliverance from sudden death, it is only that they may not be plunged without preparation, all disrobed, into the presence of their Judge. When one is ready to depart, suddenness of death is a blessing. It is a painful sight to see a tree overthrown by a tornado, wrenched from its foundations, and broken down like a weed; but it is yet more painful to see a vast and venerable tree lingering with vain strife against decay, which age and infirmity have marked for destruction. The process by which strength wastes, and the mind is obscured, and the tabernacle is taken down, is humiliating and painful; and it is good and grand when a man departs to his rest from out of the midst of duty, full-armed and strong, with pulse beating time. For such an one to go suddenly, if he be prepared to go, is but to terminate a most noble life in its most noble manner. Mark the words of the Master: "Let your loins be girded about, and your lights burning; and ye yourselves like unto men that wait for their lord, when he will return from the wedding; that when he cometh and knocketh they may open unto him immediately. Blessed are those servants whom the lord when he cometh shall find watching."

Not they that go in a stupor, but they that go with all their powers about them, and wide awake, to meet their Master, as to a wedding,

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are blessed. He died watching. He died with his armor on. midst of hours of labors, in the very heart of patriotic consultations, just returned from camps and councils, he was stricken down. fever dried his blood. No slow waste consumed him. All at once, in full strength and manhood, with his girdle tight about him, he departed, and walks with God.

Nor was the manner of his death more shocking, if we divest it of the malignity of the motives which caused it. The mere instrument itself is not one that we should shrink from contemplating. Have not thousands of soldiers fallen on the field of battle by the bullets of the enemy? Is being killed in battle counted to be a dreadful mode of dying? It was as if he had died in battle. Do not all soldiers that must fall ask to depart in the hour of battle and victory? He went in the hour of victory.

There has not been a poor drummer-boy in all this war that has fallen for whom the great heart of Lincoln would not have bled; there has not been one private soldier, without note or name, slain among thousands, and hid in the pit among hundreds, without even the memorial of a separate burial, for whom the President would not have wept. He was a man from the common people, that never forgot his kind. And now that he who might not bear the march, and toil, and battles with these humble citizens has been called to die by the bullet, as they were, do you not feel that there was a peculiar fitness to his nature and life, that he should in death be joined with them, in a final common experience, to whom he had been joined in all his sympathies.

For myself, when any event is susceptible of a higher and nobler garnishing, I know not what that disposition is that should seek to drag it down to the depths of gloom, and write it all over with the scrawls of horror or fear. I let the light of nobler thoughts fall upon his departure, and bless God that there is some argument of consolation in the matter and manner of his going, as there was in the matter and manner of his staying.

2. This blow was but the expiring rebellion. As a miniature gives all the form and features of its subject, so, epitomized in this foul act, we find the whole nature and disposition of slavery. It begins in a wanton destruction of all human rights, and in a desecration of all the sanctities of heart and home; and it is the universal enemy of mankind, and of God, who made man. It can be maintained only at the sacrifice of every right and moral feeling in its abettors and upholdI deride the man that points me to any man bred amid slavery, believing in it, and willingly practicing it, and tells me that he is a I shall find saints in perdition sooner than I shall find true manhood under the influences of so accursed a system as this. It is a two-edged sword, cutting both ways, violently destroying manhood in the oppressed, and insidiously destroying manhood in the oppressor.

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The problem is solved, the demonstration is completed, in our land. Slavery wastes its victims; and it destroys the masters. It destroys public morality, and the possibility of it. It corrupts manhood in its very centre and elements. Communities in which it exists are not to be trusted. They are rotten. Nor can you find timber grown in this accursed soil of iniquity that is fit to build our ship of state, or lay the foundation of our households. The patriotism that grows up under this blight, when put to proof, is selfish and brittle; and he that leans upon it shall be pierced. The honor that grows up in the midst of slavery is not honor, but a bastard quality that usurps the place of its better, only to disgrace the name of honor. And, as long as there is conscience, or reason, or Christianity, the honor that slavery begets will be be a bye-word and a hissing. The whole moral nature of men reared to familiarity and connivance with slavery is death-smitten. The needless rebellion; the treachery of its leaders to oaths and solemn trusts; their violation of the commonest principles of fidelity, sitting in senates, in councils, in places of public confidence, only to betray and to destroy; the long, general, and unparalleled cruelty to prisoners, without provocation, and utterly without excuse: the unreasoning malignity and fierceness-these all mark the symptoms of that disease of slavery which is a deadly poison to soul and body.

I. I do not say that there are not single natures, here and there, scattered through the vast wilderness which is covered with this poisonous vine, who escape the poison. There are, but they are not to be found among the men that believe in it, and that have been moulded by it. They are the exceptions. Slavery is itself barbarity. That nation which cherishes it is barbarous; and no outward tinsel or glitter can redeem it from the charge of barbarism. And it was fit that its expiring blow should be such as to take away from men the last forbearance, the last pity, and fire the soul with an invincible determination that the breeding-ground of such mischiefs and monsters shall be utterly and forever destroyed.

2. We needed not that he should put on paper that he believed in slavery, who, with treason, with murder, with cruelty infernal, hovered around that majestic man to destroy his life. He was himself but the long sting with which slavery struck at liberty; and he carried the poison that belonged to slavery. And as long as this nation lasts, it will never be forgotten that we have had one martyred President-never! Never, while time lasts, while heaven lasts, while hell rocks and groans, will it be forgotten that slavery, by its minions, slew him, and, in slaying him, made manifest its whole nature and tendency.

3. This blow was aimed at the life of the Government and of the nation. Lincoln was slain; America was meant. The man was cast down; the Government was smitten at. The President was killed: it was national life, breathing freedom, and meaning beneficence, that

was sought. He, the man of Illinois, the private man, divested of robes and the insignia of authority, representing nothing but his personal self, might have been hated; but it was not that that ever would have called forth the murderer's blow. It was because he stood in the place of government, representing government, and a government that represented right and liberty, that he was singled out. This, then, is a crime against universal government. It is not a blow at the foundations of our government, more than at the foundations of the English Government, of the French Government, of every compacted and well-organized government. It was a crime against mankind. The whole world will repudiate and stigmatize it as a deed without a shade of redeeming light. For this was not the oppressed, goaded to extremity, turning on his oppressor. Not the shadow of a cloud, even, has rested on the south, of wrong; and they knew it right well.

In a council held in the City of Charleston, just preceding to the attack on Fort Sumter, two Commissions were appointed to go to Washington; one on the part of the army from Fort Sumter, and one on the part of the Confederates. The lieutenant that was designated to go for us said it seemed to him that it would be of little use for him to go, as his opinion was immovably fixed in favor of maintaining the Government in whose service he was employed. Then Gov. Pickens took him aside, detaining, for an hour and a half, the railroad train that was to convey them on their errand. He opened to him the whole plan and secret of the Southern conspiracy; and said to him, distinctly and repeatedly (for it was needful, he said, to lay aside disguises), that the South had never been wronged, and that all their pretences of grievance in the matter of tariffs, or anything else, were invalid. "But, said he, "we must carry the people with us; and we allege these things, as all statesmen do many things that they do not believe, because they are the only instruments by which the people can be managed." He then and there declared that the two sections of country were so antagonistic in ideas and policies that they could not live together, that it was foreordained that Northern and Southern men must keep apart on account of differences in ideas and policies, and that all the pretences of the South about wrongs suffered were but pretences, as they very well knew. This is testimony which was given by one of the leaders in the rebellion, and which will, probably, ere long, be given under hand and seal to the public. So the South has never had wrong visited upon it except by that which was inherent in it.

This was not, then, the avenging hand of one goaded by tyranny.' It was not a despot turned on by his victim. It was the venomous hatred of liberty wielded by an avowed advocate of slavery. And, though there may have been cases of murder in which there were shades of palliation, yet this murder was without provocation, without temptation, without reason, sprung from the fury of a heart cankered

to all that was just and good, and corrupted by all that was wicked and foul.

4. The blow has signally failed. The cause is not stricken; it is strengthened. This nation has dissolved-but in tears only. It stands four-square, more solid, to-day, than any pyramid in Egypt. This people are neither wasted, nor daunted, nor disordered. Men hate slavery and love liberty with stronger hate and love to-day than ever before. The Government is not weakened, it is made stronger. How naturally and easily were the ranks closed! Another steps forward, in the hour that the one fell, to take his place and his mantle; and I avow my belief that he will be found a man true to every instinct of liberty; true to the whole trust that is reposed in him; vigilant of the Constitution; careful of the laws; wise for liberty, in that he himself, through his life, has known what it was to suffer from the stings of slavery, and to prize liberty from bitter personal experiences.

Where could the head of government in any monarchy be smitten down by the hand of an assassin, and the funds not quiver or fall onehalf of one per cent? After a long period of national di turbance, after four years of drastic war, after tremendous drafts on the resources of the country, in the height and top of our burdens, the heart of this people is such that now, when the head of government is stricken down, the public funds do not waver, but stand as the grarite ribs in our mountains.

Republican institutions have been vindicated in this experience as they never were before; and the whole history of the last four years, rounded up by this cruel stroke, seems, in the providence of God, to have been clothed, now, with an illustration, with a sympathy, with an aptness, and with a significance, such as we never could have expected nor imagined. God, I think, has said, by the voice of this event, to all nations of the earth, " Republican liberty, based upon true Christianity, is firm as the foundation of the globe."

5. Even he who now sleeps has, by this event, been clothed with new influence. Dead, he speaks to men who now willingly hear what before they refused to listen to. Now his simple and weighty words will be gathered like those of Washington, and your children, and your children's children, shall be taught to ponder the simplicity and deep wisdom of utterances which, in their time, passed, in party heat, as idle words. Men will receive a new impulse of patriotism for his sake and will guard with zeal the whole country which he loved so well. I swear you, on the altar of his memory, to be more faithful to the country for which he has perished. They will, as they follow his hearse, swear a new hatred to that slavery against which he warred, and which, in vanquishing him, has made him a martyr and a conqueror. I swear you, by the memory of this martyr, to hate slavery with an unappeasable hatred. They will admire and imitate the firmness of this man, his inflexible conscience for the right; and yet his