the tyrant in his natural or his habitual temper. In all the veins of all his frame no drop of unsympathetic blood found a channel. When retaliation seemed the only just policy for the government to adopt, to save its soldiers from being shot in cold blood, or being starved into idiocy, it was simply impossible for him to accept it. And if he had met the arch-conspirators face to face, those who had racked and really enlarged the English vocabulary to get terms to express their hatred and disgust toward him individually, those who were striking with desperate blows at the national existence,-it would have been hard for him not to greet them with open hand and a kindly welcome.

The very element of sadness, which was so inwrought with his mirthfulness and humor, and which will look out on coming generations through the pensive lines upon his face, and the light of his pathetic eyes, came into his spirit, or was constantly renewed there, through his sympathy with men, especially with the oppressed and the poor. He took upon himself the sorrows of others. He bent in extremest personal suffering under the blows that fell on his countrymen. And when the bloody rain of battle was sprinkling the trees and the sod of Virginia, during successive dreary campaigns, his inmost soul felt the baptism of it, and was sickened with grief. "I cannot bear it! I cannot bear it!" he said more than once, as the story was told him of the sacrifice required to secure some result. No glow, even of triumph, could expel from his eyes the tears occasioned by the suffering that had bought it.

And yet through this native sympathy with men he gained a large part of his immense power over his

country and his times. From it in part came, no doubt, the sublime temperateness of his spirit. He lived in times when a man without this must now and then have flamed into passion at the arrogant ferocity that taunted and smote him. But no man remembers an hour in his life when passion made his accents tremble. He hated slavery with a lifelong abhorrence, and wrestled with it for four fierce years in deadly grapple; and many men, not hating it more, not feeling it so much, had come not unnaturally to transfer to persons their wrath against the system, and had been embittered through their just indignation. He kept the utter sweetness of his spirit, as if he had been a child by the fireside. blood was not heated in the desperate struggle; and even conscience offended could not make him acrimonious.

His

He gained another power through this sympathy with men. Not only by it did he come to be endeared, so as no President preceding him had been, to the universal heart of the nation, to its women and children as well as its men; not only did its rare vital force surpass our boundaries and make the humble abroad his friends; he came, by virtue of it in great measure, to be the Representative Man of the people. It brought him into spontaneous correspondence with the average thought and feeling of the country. He did not depend on witnesses and counselors. He "knew in himself" what the "plain people" wanted, whom he honored and believed in, to whose ranks he expected soon to return, and who, as he said, were willing and able to save the government if the government would do its part indifferently well.

Through a process imperceptible to himself, no doubt, in its methods and modes, but natural to his sympathetic constitution, he came to dwell in such accord with the public-not with any one party, or any one set of leaders and thinkers, but with the collective spirit of the nation-that when he spoke it felt its thought articulated through him; and his ultimate decision, on almost any question, announced and sealed the public judgment.

The independence of his policy had its origin here. He was always ready to hear and consider any opinion. The most conservative, the most violently radical, were equally at home with him. Yet the eloquent or ingenious advocates of a theory often found, to their surprise, that they had less influence over his counsels than over those of men whom they thought his superiors. The truth is, the entire public was his teacher. His nature drew, through secret ducts, the wisdom of the nation into itself; and the roots of his matured opinions were as wide as the country.

His policy was plastic, too, and legitimately progressive as well as independent; because it represented, in successive stages, the popular mind. And where any man with a fixed and inflexible personal theory, which he must carry out, would inevitably have found it too narrow and rigid to encompass the crisis, and would have seen it hopelessly shattered in the progress of events, his policy was modified and expanded with time, because he kept abreast with the people he ruled. He carried their purpose and thought in himself. He grew with their growth, and shared in their advancing wisdom; and so, to the end, his plans were elastic, and the nation gave, to realize those plans-which did but

incorporate its wisest opinions-its whole tremendous and unreserved power.

But with this element of sympathy with men we must combine, in inseparable union, the others I have named, to get an adequate impression of his character. He had a profound and enduring conviction of the value and authority of certain great principles of equity and of liberty; while nothing was more vital or positive in him than his faith in the rule and the providence of God. From these elements his character took firmness, greatness, an individual force and majesty. He was kept from becoming a mere sensitive exponent of the popular feeling, and became instead a noble Chief Magistrate, instructed by all, yet more instructing them in return.

They who thought him only a shrewd politician were singularly mistaken. He was that, no doubt; but history will certainly rank him also among our most philosophical statesmen. The great ethical principles which, though invisible, are primitive, organific, in our national development, by which our history has been vitally moulded, and through which that history becomes important to the world-these had to him essential reality, and an incomparable value. His love for the very system of government of which he became the grand defender, had its origin in its relation to these principles; its actual approximate correspondence with them; its capacity to be shaped to express them more perfectly; its fitness and power to extend them. Without rhythm in his sentences, or any taste for esthetic art, the ideal in the state moved him more than the material, and was always an educating presence to his mind.

Sprung from the soil, a child of the teeming and wealthy West, it might have been expected that the mere physical greatness of the country would have allured and toned his thought; that its vast expanse, with its prodigal progress in wealth, population and all resources, would have been to him, as they had been to many others of our statesmen, both from the East and from the West, the occasion of his grateful and proud admiration. But, on the other hand, he seems hardly to have thought of them. He took them for granted; only casually referred to them; and was scarcely sustained or moved in his work by any considerations derived from them. The effort of the conspirators in league against the government to wrench apart what God had bolted together with mountains, and had laced inextricably into one by the marvelous system of western rivers,-their effort to sever the national domain, and to build two empires where climate, race, topography, language, combined to demand that there should be but one,-this does not seem to have roused him against it. So far as appears he never was stirred by the natural and not unlaudable ambition to have the country remain as of old, surpassing others in its physical extent, and outshining them with its more splendid treasures.

But the principles involved in the national institutions were to him inexpressibly sacred and dear; and against the warfare made upon these, on behalf of an ambition which instinctively hated them, he set his kindly face like a flint. Even the historic recollections of the nation were chiefly important or significant to him as connected with these principles; and the moral unity derived from these was that which in his thought