Last of all, near the New York Hotel, in Broadway, where I had first seen him passing on his way to Washington, I saw his coffin borne along through the immense and reverent throng of the great city on its way to Illinois. The whole country knew then how great and good a man it had lost, the only American whom we name and revere with Washington.

A WONDER AND A MYSTERY.

HIS WISDOM AND HIS TENDERNESS.

BY THE HON. HENRY L DAWES,

LATELY UNITED STATES SENATOR FROM MASSACHUSETTS.

MR. LINCOLN was always to me both a wonder and a mystery. From the day I first saw him, on the morning in which he surprised all Washington by his unexpected and unexplained appearance at the railroad depot while every one else supposed him quietly asleep in Harrisburg, through all the subsequent four years of marvellous achievement, he was to me a study. I could never quite fathom his thoughts, or be quite sure that I saw clearly the line along which he was working. But as I saw how he overcame obstacles and escaped entanglements, how he shunned hidden rocks and steered clear of treacherous shoals, as the tempest thickened, it grew upon me that he was wiser than the men around him. He never altogether lost to me the look with which he met the curious and, for the moment, not very kind gaze of the House of Representatives on that first morning after what they deemed a pusillanimous creep into Washington. It was a weary, anxious look, of one struggling to be cheerful under a burden of trouble he must keep to himself, with thoughts afar off or deep

hidden which he could not impart even to the representatives of the nation to whose Chief Magistracy he had been called and for whom he was to die. I met him many times after this; but it was never my good fortune to meet him on any of the few occasions in all his after life when the sky was so clear and the prospect so cheering as to lift from him the burden of anxiety and distress which so constantly pressed upon him. Indeed, it was in times of the deepest concern that I saw most of him, and therefore when his face, which was always a title-page, most clearly revealed the painful strain of the life he lived. Others were more fortunate in falling under the fascinating influences of the natural man on those few occasions when trouble spared him for a brief interval, lifting its weight from off the springs and impulses of his real life. These were the lights which set off the shades of the four years' picture otherwise painfully sombre.

Every one, however, came away from his presence, whether it was when he was in his serious or lighter mood, impressed with his stature as a man. That which all the world, looking back over the vista of thirty years upon the great events of that period, now concedes with entire unanimity, grew by slow degrees, but more clearly every hour, to be the conviction of those who stood about him, and saw what manner of man he was. The world sees now, what contemporaries were reluctant to believe, that the nation had no other man for the place to which he was assigned by the Great Disposer of those

events.

It would be almost a waste of words to bring up anew to the minds of those who have studied the agencies of different men most conspicuous in the bringing about

the great achievements of Mr. Lincoln's time, the many proofs of a clearness of foresight, an unerring judgment dissipating mists and clarifying doubts, and a wisdom astonishing the wisest, which met perils and solved problems and adjusted complications which appalled and confounded the wisest and most patriotic of those around him. Those called to hold up his hands as counsellors found him calmer and clearer-sighted than they, and more than one in command of armies under him pronounced him the ablest strategist of the War. It was intuition, not learning or experience, that guided his pen in reshaping Mr. Seward's first instructions to Mr. Adams, our Minister to England, and saved the nation from an untenable attitude toward the rebel States, upon which hostile Europe was making haste to seize. It was political wisdom passing that of any other man which enabled him to hold in check the too ardent, and at the same time hold up the too timid and faint-hearted, while he worked out, without convulsion, the solution of the problem of emancipation. Reconstruction, though not accomplished in his lifetime, was certainly held, under his guiding hand, free from the disasters which came upon it when the reins fell from his grasp. The political sagacity of no other man was ever equal to that which enabled him to gather around him in earnest support of his administration, rivalries, opposing purposes, conflicting theories, and implacable enmities, which would have rent asunder any other administration. No one like him could turn aside, so that they hurt him not, the shafts of malice and detraction, or like him could compose strifes and poultice heart-burnings till enthusiasm drove out sulkiness. Whether it was in the small things or in the great things with which he had to deal,

he was equally matchless. And all this was born in him. Neither education nor experience nor example had anything to do with the production of this great central, controlling force in the greatest of all the crises that ever came upon the nation. His development kept pace with the multiplying exigencies which confronted him, and he was never found wanting. He grew wiser and broader and stronger as difficulties thickened and perils multiplied, till the end found him the wonder in our history. His last public utterance, only three days before his death, when, taking the nation into his confidence as never before, he spoke of the controlling motive of the past, to what it had brought the nation thus far, and what was yet to be done, all put forth with a simplicity and power of speech no other man possessed, stands unchallenged in the light of thirty years of subsequent study and experience of what was gained and what was lost when power passed into other hands.

I love to think of him, however, as the man open to human and humane influences, pained by the distress and sorrow which filled the land, shedding tears over the terrible sacrifice of life which was the price paid for victories that filled others with exultation. No familiarity with the horrors inseparable from war ever so hardened the softest and tenderest heart that ever beat in the breast of man that it did not bleed in a hospital, that it did not rebel against the necessity which compelled him to deny the importunities of sorrowing fathers and broken-hearted mothers whose sons had fallen within the enemy's lines, or were languishing in prisons beyond his. reach. The desolation and woe which followed the work forced upon him saddened every waking hour of his life. from the day that terrible work began.