be set to keep the true time-if they can.

in

One measure or indication of the greatness of his personality, separated from the circumstances which he lived, is to be found in the fact that at this day all men regard him as belonging, now, to the entire nation. During a part of his lifetime, he was nominally the chief of a political party, the foremost figure in a prolonged conflict that was full of the utmost rancor of opposing factions. After that, he became the director of the military and other forces upon one side of a long and sanguinary civil war, and during the years of its continuance and even for a brief period afterwards, the animosities of that terrible struggle seemed to concentrate their bitterness upon him. Nevertheless, few as are the years since the termination of his

public services, his name has risen above all that tumult, like a star rising above a subsiding sea, and any idea of partisanship, or even of sectionalism, has faded away from the popular perception of his character.

It is more and more clearly manifest that Lincoln is so readily understood because of the extreme simplicity of his nature and of his consequent action. For example, nobody would deny that he was ambitious, in the sense that ambition is common to all vigorous, aspiring men, but there is a settled and general belief, or rather perception, that anything in the nature of personal or selfish ambition was burned away in the furnace through which he passed and that its idea must now detach from his memory.

Many and important as were the matters and measures he dealt with

during the stormy years of his official service, his state papers, properly So called, were few. Hardly one of them falls short, however, of being in itself an important feature in the record of the time, for all were as forces set in action and producing perceptible results. Their condensed style, their freedom from anything like rhetorical ornament, their close connection with public business and its details, render them, for the greater part unavailable for brief quotation purposes. Nevertheless, the popular mind has here and there discovered, severed and preserved wise utterances which have become almost as household words.

Some of Lincoln's speeches, before his election as President, possess a similar value for they are at once state papers, generally regarded as such, then and afterwards,

and they are also as historical landmarks, measuring periods in the progress of events.

He

His correspondence, while yet a private citizen, was free but not copious, and the interest attaching to such specimens of it as have been preserved is mainly personal or biographical. After he became the chief magistrate of the nation, he almost ceased to write personal letters, or even to read them. seemed to have no longer any interests, hardly any thoughts, apart from the duties and endurances of his official position. The few letters that he did write were almost as if they had been addressed to the nation, rather than to individuals, and some of their words may be treasured as public heirlooms.

A study of the utterances which are now regarded as peculiarly expressing his wisdom, his developed

character, or his convictions concerning truth, discovers the fact that hardly any of them are of any earlier date than the year 1856. Very nearly all that are of marked importance belong to the last seven years of his life. They seem to attest that, in comparison with this. period, the years of his greatest public service and personal trial, all the years preceding it were short. There were certainly more than forty years that were as youth, as schooling, as varied methods of preparation. Afterwards, the mere. almanac-measure became of less account and it is by no means a mere figure of speech to say that he had lived long and was older than other men when he died,-at fiftysix.

Wide as was Lincoln's fame as an orator, comparatively few of his political speeches were reported. Even