THE THE BOSTON COMMEMORATION HE Boston had HE city of Boston had an elaborate official celebration under the direction of a Committee of Twenty-five, appointed by the Honorable Geo. A. Hibbard, Mayor of Boston, of which committee Mr. Bernard J. Rothwell was Chairman, and Colonel J. Payson Bradley, Secretary. The Committee was composed of the leading citizens, and under its auspices, special and numerous celebrations were planned and carried out throughout the city. On the morning of the Centenary day, commemorative exercises were held in all of the schools, well-known speakers appearing upon the programmes; the general idea of the Boston Committee being-as was the prevailing desire elsewhereto make the celebration not only a tribute and a memorial, but an educational force, disseminating among the younger generation knowledge of the life, the ideals, and the deeds of Lincoln. One hundred and thirteen thousand school children took part in the observances of the day. Another feature of the morning celebration was the joint session, at noon, of the Senate and House of Representatives of Massachusetts, commemorative of the day-the Honorable Henry Cabot Lodge, United States Senator from Massachusetts, delivering the impressive oration. The afternoon was given over to celebrations by the Grand Army of the Republic and the various other patriotic societies, while in the evening a great mass-meeting gathered at Symphony Hall. Here crowds stood in the streets for hours, waiting for the doors to open at 7:30 o'clock; and the big edifice was filled and overflowing in less than ten minutes, with twice as many people unable to get into the building and being turned away. Major Henry L. Higginson acted as permanent chairman of the meeting. Upon the platform, in addition to the speakers of the occasion, were seated Governor Draper, members of his staff, and representatives of practically every line of City and State activity. Members of the Grand Army Posts of Boston were present, and their colors were planted on either side of the stage. A section of the auditorium was reserved for these veterans of the Civil War. Here the oration was delivered by the Honorable John D. Long, Ex-Secretary of the Navy, a former Governor of Massachusetts; and the author of the famous "Battle Hymn of the Republic," Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, read an original poem on Lincoln. Other features of the meeting were an address by Honorable Geo. A. Hibbard, Mayor of Boston, and the reading of the Governor's Proclamation by Colonel J. Payson Bradley, Secretary of the Lincoln Day Committee. The city was dotted with flags; they hung from the immense public buildings, and waved from windows and balconies of private homes; while in the harbor the foreign and American vessels observed the day by flying their flags-tow-boats, ferries, and fishing boats joining in this silent memorial. A VISION JULIA WARD HOWE HROUGH the dim pageant of the years THE A wondrous tracery appears: A cabin of the western wild Nor nurse, nor parent dear, can know Beyond is toil for daily bread, A man of homely, rustic ways, No throne of honors and delights; A treacherous shot, a sob of rest, And, thrilling through unmeasured days, THE GREAT PACIFICATOR HON. JOHN D. LONG E are here to commemorate the one hundredth birth WE day of Abraham Lincoln-a great and good man in the simple, fundamental sense of the words. We recall that supreme life, that magnanimous soul full of charity and without malice. His rugged face, his lank, homely figure, rise before us transfigured to a beauty beyond that of the statued Apollo in yonder niche, as the beating heart transcends the lifeless marble. The personal appearance of the famous men of history is always a factor in our ideal of them. In the mind's eye we picture Richard, the Lion Heart, riding in his coat of mail and swinging his ponderous battle-axe, and George Washington, in the dignified costume of a gentleman of the old school. But there are no adventitious aids to the effect of the personal appearance of Abraham Lincoln, nor did he need any. He was six feet four inches high, a little bent in the shoulders, with large hands and feet, a frame of great joints and bones, a prominent nose and mouth, a high forehead and coarse dark hair, and was dressed, when President, in homely and loosely fitting black. His furrowed and melancholy face and sad eyes were suggestive of a "man of sorrows and acquainted with grief," yet were capable of quickest transition into an expression of infinite humor. What depths of feeling and tenderness lay under that rugged visage, what divine sympathy with his fellow men, and an enslaved or weak and erring brother! And beneath that proverbial wit which so often lighted it, there lay also the fountain of tears. An exquisite pathos breathed from the chords of a sympathetic, softly attuned nature, as if you caught from them the sensitive wistful tones of Schumann's "Träumerei.” It is an unfounded notion that the conditions of our frontier life--alas! we no longer have any frontier-are to be counted unfavorable. On the contrary, they have been, from the days when Massachusetts was herself a frontier, the best soil for characteristic American ambition and growth. There are those who express surprise that Lincoln was the product of what they deem the narrow and scanty environment from which he sprang. As well wonder at the giant of the forest, deep rooted, bathing its top in the upper air, fearless of scorch of sun or blast of tempest, sprung from the fertile soil and luxuriant growth of the virgin earth, and rich with the fragrance and glory of Nature's paradise! I can hardly think of a life more fortunate. The Lincolns settled in Hingham, Massachusetts, a few years after the coming of the Mayflower. The family ranks with our early Puritan nobility of worth and character. One branch of it migrated to Pennsylvania and thence to Virginia. More than a hundred years ago Lincoln's grandfather went thence to Kentucky, built a log cabin, cleared a farm, and was killed by Indians. Lincoln's father was of the same sort-pioneer, farmer, hunter, uneducated, but in touch with the sturdy qualities that were the mark of the Kentucky settlers. His mother, dying in his early boyhood, was a woman of beauty, of character, and of education enough to teach her husband to write his name. His stepmother, saintly Christian soul, sheltered the orphan under her loving care, and, scanty as was her lot, allured him to brighter worlds and led the way. Compared with the luxurious profusion of to-day, it was wretched and hopeless poverty; but, compared with the standard of the then neighborhood and time-the only right standard-it was the independence of men who owned the land, who strode masters of the soil, who were barons, not serfs, who were equal with their associates, and among whom the child Abraham Lincoln, eating his bread and milk from. a wooden bowl as he sat on the threshold of his father's cabin-one side of it wide open to the weather-was no more an object of despair or pity than the babe who, cradled among the flags by the river's brink, dreamed of the hosts of Israel to whom he should reveal the Tables of the Law of God, |