PREFACE

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OST books of selections from the writings and conversations of Abraham Lincoln are designed primarily to show the peculiarities of his unique personality. Composed largely of his humorous stories, his witty and satirical comments upon his contemporaries, and anecdotes revealing the eccentricities of his genius, they uniformly produce a caricature of the accidental rather than essential features of him who stands as the ideal type of American manhood.

In this anthology this limited and thoroughly culled field has been avoided, and the broader domain of Lincoln's genius explored to find the fruits of his ripened wisdom rather than the flowers of his › brilliant and pungent personality. The mind and the soul of the man are shown, possibly too purely and severely. Yet

while softening details are lacking in this portrait, all the strong and well-beloved lineaments of Lincoln are preserved, each line as he himself drew it. Every passage is authentic and authoritative, the source and date of its utterance being given. The extracts are arranged in chronological order. The index of the book is by subjects.

The compiler acknowledges with thanks permission given him by the Current Literature Publishing Company to use the text of its Centenary Edition of the Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln in making the extracts.

MARION MILLS MILLER.

THE FIRST AMERICAN

Extract from Ode recited at the Harvard Commemoration, July 21, 1865

BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

HITHER leads the path

WH

To ampler fates that leads?
Not down through flowery meads,
To reap an aftermath

Of youth's vainglorious weeds;
But up the steep, amid the wrath
And shock of deadly-hostile creeds,
Where the world's best hope and stay
By battle's flashes gropes a desperate way,
And every turf the fierce foot clings to bleeds.
Peace hath her not ignoble wreath,

Ere yet the sharp, decisive word

Light the black lips of cannon, and the sword
Dreams in its easeful sheath;

But some day the live coal behind the thought,
Whether from Baäl's stone obscene,
Or from the shrine serene

Of God's pure altar brought,

Bursts up in flame; the war of tongue and pen Learns with what deadly purpose it was

fraught,

And, helpless in the fiery passion caught, Shakes all the pillared state with shock of

men:

Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed
Confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued,
And cries reproachful: "Was it, then, my
praise,

And not myself was loved? Prove now thy

truth;

I claim of thee the promise of thy youth;
Give me thy life, or cower in empty phrase,
The victim of thy genius, not its mate!"
Life may be given in many ways,
And loyalty to Truth be sealed
As bravely in the closet as the field,
So bountiful is Fate;

But then to stand beside her,
When craven churls deride her,
To front a lie in arms and not to yield,
This shows, methinks, God's plan
And measure of a stalwart man,
Limbed like the old heroic breeds,

Who stands self-poised on manhood's solid

earth,

Not forced to frame excuses for his birth, Fed from within with all the strength he needs.

Such was he, our Martyr-Chief,

Whom late the Nation he had led,

With ashes on her head,

Wept with the passion of an angry grief :