play which held the boards at Ford's Theater the night of the assassination. In William Cullen Bryant's "Abraham Lincoln," there are other lines as good as these: "Whose proudest monument shall be The broken fetters of the slave." Richard Henry Stoddard's "Horatian Ode," Bayard Taylor's "Gettysburg Ode," George H. Boker's and S. Weir Mitchell's verses, Whittier's "Emancipation Group," his dedicatory poem on the occasion of the unveiling of a monument in Boston, Richard Watson Gilder's "Life Mask of Abraham Lincoln," and a Lincoln sonnet by Edmund Clarence Stedman, are among other notable contributions. Stedman's "Hand of Lincoln " opens with a stanza which discloses the quality and plan of this interesting poem: "Look on this cast, and know the hand That bore a nation in its hold; From this mute witness understand What Lincoln was how large of mould." Maurice Thompson, a Confederate soldier, in his poem on "Lincoln's Grave," has interpreted perhaps best of all the full breadth of the man's sympathies, as these few verses may serve to show: "He was the southern mother leaning forth, At dead of night to hear the cannon roar, Beseeching God to turn the cruel North And break it that her son might come once more; He was New England's maiden pale and pure, Whose gallant lover fell on Shiloh's plain. "He was the North, the South, the East, the West, The thrall, the master, all of us in one. LESSONS FROM LINCOLN Time and change, instead of dimming his fame, have only served to make his example more needed and useful. — Claimed by all parties and all sections. The true prophet of the reunited people. — His influence growing world-wide. - Washington and Lincoln. The The latter belongs wholly to America. full meaning of the man remains for future generations to discover. His greatness a miracle, or only the common sense of a common man? - Lincoln's inspiring message to all men. ABRAHAM LINCOLN was born into a world very different from ours so different that it seems to have been in another age. The bees of Bonaparte swarmed over Europe, and the peace of Vienna had left him, at the climax of his career, the master of the continent, from the Russian frontier to the Mediterranean. George III, though in his dotage, yet wore the crown from which the most splendid jewel had been plucked by the sword of Washington. Africa was almost unknown, and, aside from India, Asia was as little known as it was five hundred years before. Along the western shore of this continent, the banner of Spain waved over an immense empire, which stretched unbroken from the Sierra Nevadas to Cape Horn. In our own flag there were only Thomas Jefferson was the Presi seventeen stars. dent of a nation of seven million people. Robert Fulton's steamboat was only two years old. Stephenson's locomotive was yet twenty years away. Labor's burden was measured only by what it could bear. The black toiler was a chattel, and his white brother struggled beneath an industrial serfdom which had every legal and social sanction. Women had almost as few rights at law as they had a cycle before, and no broader sphere of activity. Democracy was without a foothold in any of the principal countries of the Old World. England was still an aristocracy, and as much ruled by the few as at any time in the six centuries since Runnymede. The United States had a government for the people, but not yet by the people. There was a governing class in the town, the state, and the nation. The log-cabin was not regarded as a breeding-place for statesmen, and if a fortune-teller had whispered in the ear of Jefferson that the babe in Nancy Hanks's arms would one day sit in the President's chair, the imagination even of that great Democrat would have been staggered. Lincoln's death, as well as his birth, seems remote to the people of this generation. It is commonly said that life has changed quite as much in the few |