century, not only in the field of politics but in the field of thought. Do you realize that modern science is not older than the middle of the last century? Modern science came into the world to revolutionize our thinking and our material enterprises just about the time that Mr. Lincoln was uttering those remarkable debates with Mr. Douglas. The struggle which determined the life of the Union came just at the time when a new issue was joined in the field of thought, and men began to reconstruct their conceptions of the universe and of their relation to nature, and even of their relation to God. There is, I believe, no more significant century in the history of man than the nineteenth century, and its whole sweep is behind us.

That year 1809 produced, as you know, a whole group of men who were to give distinction to its annals in many fields of thought and of endeavor. To mention only some of the great men who were born in 1809: the poet Tennyson was born in that year, our own poet Edgar Allan Poe, the great Sherman, the great Mendelssohn, Chopin, Charles Darwin, William E. Gladstone, and Abraham Lincoln. Merely read that list and you are aware of the singular variety of gifts and purposes represented. Tennyson was, to my thinking, something more than a poet. We are apt to be so beguiled by the music of his verse as to suppose that its charm and power lie in its music; but there is something about the poet which makes him the best interpreter, not only of life, but of national purpose, and there is to be found in Tennyson a great body of interpretation which utters the very voice of Anglo-Saxon liberty. That fine line in which he speaks of how English liberty has "broadened down from precedent to precedent" embodies the noble slowness, the very process and the very certainty, of the forces which made men politically free in the great century in which he wrote. He was a master who saw into the heart of affairs, as well as a great musician who seemed to give them the symphony of sound.

And then there was our own Poe, that exquisite workman in the human language, that exquisite artisan in all the nice

effects of speech, the man who dreamed all the odd dreams of the human imagination, and who quickened us with all the singular stories that the mind can invent, and did it all with the nicety and certainty of touch of the consummate artist.

And then there were Chopin and Mendelssohn, whose music constantly rings in our ears and lifts our spirits to new sources of delight. And there was Charles Darwin, with an insight into nature next to Newton's own; and Gladstone, who knew how to rule men by those subtle forces of oratory which shape the history of the world and determine the relations of nations to each other.

And then our Lincoln. When you read that name you are at once aware of something that distinguishes it from all the rest. There was in each of those other men some special gift, but not in Lincoln. You cannot pick Lincoln out for any special characteristic. He did not have any one of those peculiar gifts that the other men on this list possessed. He does not seem to belong in a list at all; he seems to stand unique and singular and complete in himself. The name makes the same impression upon the ear that the name of Shakespeare makes, because it is as if he contained a world within himself. And that is the thing which marks the singular stature and nature of this great-and, we would fain believe, typical-American. Because when you try to describe the character of Lincoln you seem to be trying to describe a great process of nature. Lincoln seems to have been of general human use and not of particular and limited human use. There was no point at which life touched him that he did not speak back to it instantly its meaning. There was no affair that touched him to which he did not give back life, as if he had communicated a spark of fire to kindle it. The man seemed to have, slumbering in him, powers which he did not exert of his own choice, but which woke the moment they were challenged, and for which no challenge was too great or comprehensive.

You know how slow, how almost sluggish the development of the man was.

You know how those who consorted with him

in his youth noted the very thing of which I speak. They would have told you that Abraham Lincoln was good for nothing in particular; and the singular fact is he was good for nothing in particular-he was good for everything in general. He did not narrow and concentrate his power, because it was meant to be diffused as the sun itself. And so he went through his youth like a man who has nothing to do, like a man whose mind is never halted at any point where it becomes serious, to seize upon the particular endeavor or occupation for which it is intended. He went from one sort of partial success to another sort of partial success, or, as his contemporaries would have said, from failure to failure, until-not until he found himself, but until, so to say, affairs found him, and the crisis of a country seemed suddenly to match the universal gift of his nature; until a great nature was summed up, not in any particular business or activity, but in the affairs of a whole country. It was characteristic of the man.

Have you ever looked at some of those singular statues of the great French sculptor Rodin-those pieces of marble in which only some part of a figure is revealed and the rest is left in the hidden lines of the marble itself; where there emerges the arm and the bust and the eager face, it may be, of a man, but his body disappears in the general bulk of the stone, and the lines fall off vaguely? I have often been made to think, in looking at those statues, of Abraham Lincoln. There was a little disclosed in him, but not all. You feel that he was so far from being exhausted by the demands of his life that more remained unrevealed than was disclosed to our view. The lines run off into infinity and lead the imagination into every great conjecture. We wonder what the man might have done, what he might have been, and we feel that there was more promise in him when he died than when he was born; that the force was so far from being exhausted that it had only begun to display itself in its splendor and perfection. No man can think of the life of Lincoln without feeling that the man was cut off almost at his beginning.

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And so it is with every genius of this kind, not singular but universal, because there were uses to which it was not challenged. You feel that there is no telling what it might have done in days to come, when there would have been new demands made upon its strength and upon its versatility. He is like some great reservoir of living water which you can freely quaff but can never exhaust. There is something absolutely endless about the lines of such a life.

And you will see that that very fact renders it difficult indeed to point out the characteristics of a man like Lincoln. How shall you describe general human nature brought to its finest development?-for such was this man. We say that he was honest; men used to call him "Honest Abe." But honesty is not a quality. Honesty is the manifestation of character. Lincoln was honest because there was nothing small or petty about him, and only smallness and pettiness in a nature can produce dishonesty. Such honesty is a quality of largeness. It is that openness of nature which will not condescend to subterfuge, which is too big to conceal itself. Little men run to cover and deceive you. Big men cannot and will not run to cover, and do not deceive you. Of course, Lincoln was honest. But that was not a peculiar characteristic of him; that is a general description of him. He was not small or mean, and his honesty was not produced by any calculation, but was the genial expression of the great nature that was behind it.

Then we also say of Lincoln that he saw things with his own eyes. And it is very interesting that we can pick out individual men to say that of them. The opposite of the proposition is, that most men see things with other men's eyes. And that is the pity of the whole business of the world. Most men do not see things with their own eyes. If they did they would not be so inconspicuous as they consent to be. What most persons do is to live up to formulas and opinions and believe them, and never give themselves the trouble to ask whether they are true or not; so that there is a great deal of truth in saying that the trouble is, that men believe so many things that are not so, because they have taken them

at second hand; they have accepted them in the form they were given to them. They have not reëxamined them. They have not seen the world with their own eyes. But Lincoln saw it with his own eyes. And he not only saw the surface of it, but saw beneath the surface of it; for the characteristic of the seeing eye is that it is a discerning eye, seeing also that which is not caught by the surface; it penetrates to the heart of the subjects it looks upon. Not only did this man look upon life with a discerning eye. If you read of his youth and of his early manhood, it would seem that these were his only and sufficient pleasures. Lincoln seemed to covet nothing from his business except that it would give him leisure enough to do this very thing-to look at other people; to talk about them; to sit by the stove in the evening and discuss politics with them; to talk about all the things that were going on, to make shrewd, penetrating comments upon them, to speak his penetrating jests.

I had a friend once who said he seriously thought that the business of life was conversation. There is a good deal of Mr. Lincoln's early life which would indicate that he was of the same opinion. He believed that, at any rate, the most attractive business of life was conversation; and conversation, with Lincoln, was an important part of the business of life, because it was conversation which uncovered the meanings of things and illuminated the hidden places where nobody but Lincoln had ever thought of looking.

You remember the very interesting story told about Mr. Lincoln in his early practice as a lawyer. Some business firm at a distance wrote to him and asked him to look into the credit of a certain man who had asked to have credit extended to him by the firm. Mr. Lincoln went around to see the man at his place of business, and reported to this effect: that he had found the man in an office which contained one table and two chairs, "But," he added, "there is a hole in the corner that would bear looking into." That anecdote, slight as it is, is typical of Mr. Lincoln. He sometimes found the character of the man lurking in a hole; and when his speech touched that character it was illuminated; you could