and its restrictions on intercourse, comes as out of a clear heaven the thunderbolt that pierces the tender, sacred head that we were ready to crown with a nation's blessings, while trusting to its wis dom and gentleness, its faithfulness and prudence, the closing up of the country's wounds, and the apparelling of the nation, her armor laid aside, in the white robes of peace.

Our beloved President, who had enshrined himself not merely ithe confidence, the respect, and the gratitude of the people, but i. their very hearts, as their true friend, adviser, representative, and brother whom the nation loved as much as it revered; who had soothed our angry impatience in this fearful struggle with his gentle moderation and passionless calm; who had been the head of the nation, and not the chief of a successful party; and had treated our enemies like rebellious children, and not as foreign foes, providing even in their chastisement for mercy and penitent restoration ; our prudent, firm, humble, reverential, God-fearing President is dead!

It

The assassin's hand has reached him who was belted round with a nation's devotion, and whom a million soldiers have hitherto encircled with their watchful guardianship. Panoplied in honesty and simplicity of purpose, too universally well-disposed to believe in danger to himself, free from ambition, self-consequence, and show, he has always shown a fearless heart, gone often to the front, made himself accessible to all at home, trusted the people, joined their amusements, answered their summons, and laid himself open every day to the malice and murderous chances of domestic foes. seemed as if no man could raise his hand against that meek ruler, or confront with purpose of injury that loving eye, that sorrowstricken face, ploughed with care, and watchings, and tears! So marked with upright patient purposes of good to all, of justice and mercy, of sagacious roundabout wisdom, was his homely paternal countenance, that I do not wonder that his murderer killed him from behind, and could not face the look that would have disarmed him in the very moment of his criminal madness.

But he has gone! Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States during the most difficult, trying, and important period of the nation's history; safe conductor of our policy through a crisis such as no other people ever had to pass; successful summoner of a million and a quarter of American citizens to arms in behalf of their flag and their Union; author of the Proclamation of Emancipation; the people's President; the heir of Washington's place at the hearths and altars of the land; legitimate idol of the negro race-the perfect type of American democracy-the astute adviser of our generals in

the field; the careful student of their strategy, and their personal friend and inspirer; the head of his Cabinet, prevailing by the passionless simplicity of his integrity and unselfish patriotism over the larger experience, the more brilliant gifts, the more vigorous purposes of his constitutional advisers; a President indeed; not the mere figure-head of the State, but its helmsman and pilot; shrinking from no perplexity, magnanimous in self-accusation and in readiness to gather into his own bosom the spears of rebuke aimed at his counsellors and agents; the tireless servant of his place; no duty so small and wearisome that he shirked it, none so great and persistent that he sought to fling it upon others; the man who, fully tried (not without fitful vacillations of public sentiment which visited on him the difficulties of the times and situation), tried through four years in which every quality of the man, the statesman, the Christian, was tested; in the face of a jeering enemy and foreign sneers and domestic ribaldry, elected again by overwhelming majorities to be their chief and their representative during another term of office, in which it was supposed even superior qualities and services would be required to meet the nation's exigencies. This tried, this honored, this beloved head of the government and country is, alas! suddenly snatched from us at the moment of our greatest need and our greatest joy, and taken up higher to his heavenly reward! Thank God, he knew how the nation loved and reverenced him! His re-election was the most solid proof of that which could possibly have been given. He has tasted, too, the negro's pious gratitude and tearful, glorious affection! He had lived to give the order for ceasing our preparations for war-an act almost equivalent to proclaiming peace! He had seen of the travail of his soul, and was satisfied. He had done the work of a life in his first term of service; almost every day of his second term, not forty days old, had been marked with victories, until no good news could have been received that would have much swelled his joy and honest pride! And now, as the typical figure, the historic name of this great era, its glory rounded and full, the Almighty Wisdom has seen fit to close the record, and isolate the special work he has done, lest by any possible mischance the flawless beauty and symmetric oneness of the President's career should be impaired, its unique glory compromised by after issues, or its special lustre mixed with rays of another color, though it might be of an equal splendor !

The Past, at least, is secure! Nothing can touch him further. Standing the central form in the field of this mighty, providential struggle, he fitly represents the purity, calmness, justice, and mercy of the loyal American people; their unconquered resolution to con

quer secession and break slavery in pieces; their sober, mild sense; their religious confidence that God is on their side, and their cause the cause of universal humanity! Let us be reconciled to the appointment which has released that weighty and patient head, that pathetic tender heart, that worn and weary hand from the perplexing details of national rehabilitation. Let the lesser, meaner cares and anxieties of the country fall on other shoulders than those which have borne up the pillars of the nation when shaken with the earthquake.

And seeing it is God who has afflicted us, who doeth all things well, let us believe that it is expedient for us that our beloved chief should go away. He goes to consecrate his work by flinging his life as well as his labors and his conscience into the nation's cause. He that has cheered so many on to bloody sacrifice, found unexpected, surprising opportunity to give also his own blood! He died, as truly as any warrior dies on the battle-field, in the nation's service, and shed his blood for her sake! It was the nation that was aimed at by the bullet that stilled his aching brain. As the representative of a cause, the type of a victory, he was singled out and slain! His life and career now have the martyr's palm added to the statesman's, philanthropist's, and patriot's crowns. His place is sure in the innermost shrine of his country's gratitude. His name will match with Washington's, and go with it laden with blessings down to the remotest posterity!

And may we not have needed this loss, in which we gain a national martyr and an ascended leader, to inspire us from his heavenly seat, where with the other father of his country he sits in glory, while they send united benedictions and lessons of comfort and of guidance down upon their common children-may we not have needed this loss to sober our hearts in the midst of our national triumph, lest in the excess of our joy and our pride we should overstep the bounds of that prudence and the limits of that earnest seriousness which our affairs demand? We have stern and solemn duties yet to perform, great and anxious tasks to achieve. We must not, after ploughing the fields with the burning share of civil war, and fertilizing them with the blood and bones of a half million noble youth, lose the great harvest by wasting the short season of ingathering in festive joy at its promise and its fulness! We have, perhaps, been prematurely glad. In the joy of seeing our haven in view we have been disposed to slacken the cordage and let the sails flap idly, and the hands go below, when the storm was not fairly over nor all the breakers out of sight! God has startled us, to apprize us of our peril; to warn us of possible mischances, and to

caution us how we abuse our confidence and overtrust our enemy. I hope and pray that the nation may feel itself, by the dreadful calamity that has befallen it, summoned to its knees; called to a still more pious sense of its dependence, toned up to its duties, and compelled to watch with the most eager patience the course of its generals, its statesmen, and its press. It cannot be for nothing vast and important that the venerated and beloved head of this people and his chief counsellor and companion have thus been brought low in an hour, one to his very grave, the other to the gates of death!

It would seem as if every element of tragic power and pathos were fated to enter this rebellion and mark it out forever as a warning to the world. It really began in the Senate House, when the bludgeon of South Carolina felled the State of Massachussetts and the honor of the Union in the person of a brave and eloquent Senator. The shot at Fort Sumter was not so truly the fatal beginning of the war as the blow in the Senate Chamber. That blow proclaimed the barbarism, the cruelty, the stealthiness, the treachery, the recklessness of reason and justice, the contempt of prudence and foresight which a hundred years of legalized oppression and inhumanity had bred in the South! And now, that blow, deepening into thunder, echoes from the head of the Chief Magistrate, as if slavery could not be dismissed forever, until her barbaric cruelty, her reckless violence, her political blasphemy, had illustrated itself upon the most conspicuous arena, under the most damning light and the most memorable and unforgetable circumstances in which crime was ever yet committed!

And in the same hour that the thoughtful, meek, and care-worn head of the President was smitten to death-a head that had sunk to its pillow for so many months full of unembittered, gentle, conciliatory, yet anxious and watchful thoughts-the neck on which that President had leaned with an affectionate confidence that was half womanly, during all his administration, was assailed with the bowie-knife, which stands for Southern vengeance, and slavery's natural weapon! The voice of the free North, the tongue and throat of liberty, was fitly assailed, when slavery and secession would exhibit her dying feat of malignant revenge. Through the channels of that neck had flowed for thirty years, the temperate, persistent, strong, steady currents of this nation's resistance to the encroachments of the slave-power, of this people's aspirations for release from the curse and the peril of a growing race of slaves. That throat had voiced the nation's great argument in the Senate Chamber. The arm that had written the great series of letters

which defended the nation from the schemes of foreign diplomatists, was already accidentally broken; the jaw that had so eloquently moved was dislocated too; but slavery remembered the neck that bowed not when most others were bent to her power; remembered the throat that was vocal in her condemnation when most others in public life were silent from policy or fear; remembered the words of him, who more than any man, slew her with his tongue; and so her last assault was upon the jugular veins of the Secretary of State. Her bloodhounds sprang at the throat of him who had denied their right and broken their power to spring at the neck of the slave himself!

But thus far, thank God, slavery is baffled in her last effort. Mr. Seward lives to tell us what no man knows so well, the terrible perils through which we have passed at home and abroad; lives to tell us the goodness, the wisdom, the piety of the President he was never weary of praising. "He is the best man I ever knew," he said to me a year ago. What a eulogy from one so experienced, so acute, so wise, so gentle! Ah, brethren, the head of the government is gone; but he who knew his counsels, and was his other self, still lives, and may God hear to-day a nation's prayer for his life.

Meanwhile heaven rejoices this Easter morning in the resurrection of our lost leader, honored in the day of his death; dying on the anniversary of our Lord's great sacrifice, a mighty sacrifice himself for the sins of a whole people.

We will not grudge him his release, or selfishly recall him from his rest and his reward! The only unpitied object in this national tragedy, he treads to-day the courts of light, radiant with the joy that even in heaven celebrates our Saviour's resurrection from the dead! The sables we hang in our sanctuaries and streets have no place where he is! His hearse is plumed with a nation's grief; his resurrection is hailed with the songs of revolutionary patriots, of soldiers that have died for their country. He, the commander-inchief, has gone to his army of the dead! The patriot President has gone to our Washington! The meek and lowly Christian is to-day with him who said on earth, “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavily laden, and I will give you rest," and who, rising to-day, fulfils his glorious words, "I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whoso liveth and believeth in me shall never die."