the error from the truth that might be in it; the other did not dare to investigate, because its own established prides and systems were dearer to it than the truth itself, and so even truth went about in it doing the work of error. The one was ready to state broad principles, of the brotherhood of man, the universal fatherhood and justice of God, however imperfectly it might realize them in practice; the other denied even the principles, and so dug deep and laid below its special sins the broad foundation of a consistent, acknowledged sinfulness. In a word, one nature was full of the influences of freedom, the other nature was full of the influences of slavery.

The cause that Abraham Lincoln died for shall grow stronger by his death-stronger and sterner. Stronger to set its pillars deep into the structure of our nation's life; sterner to execute the justice of the Lord upon his enemies. Stronger to spread its arms and grasp our whole land into freedom; sterner to sweep the last poor ghost of slavery out of our haunted homes. But while we feel the folly of this act, let not its folly hide its wickedness. It was the wickedness of slavery putting on a foolishness for which its wickedness and that alone is responsible, that robbed the nation of a President and the people of a father. And remember this, that the folly of the slave-power in striking the representative of freedom, and thinking that thereby it killed freedom itself, is only a folly that we shall echo if we dare to think that in punishing the representatives of slavery who did this deed, we are putting slavery to death. Dispersing armies and hanging traitors, imperatively as justice and necessity may demand them both, are not killing the spirit out of which they sprang. The traitor must die because he has committed treason. The murderer must die because he has committed murder. Slavery must die, because out of it, and it alone, came forth the treason of the traitor and the murder of the murderer. Do not say that it is dead. It is not, while its essential spirit lives. While one man counts another man. his born inferior for the color of his skin, while both in North and South prejudices and practices, which the law cannot touch, but which God hates, keep alive in our people's hearts the spirit of the old iniquity, it is not dead. The new American nature must supplant the old. We must grow like our President, in

his truth, his independence, his religion, and his wide humanity. Then the character by which he died shall be in us, and by it we shall live. Then peace shall come that knows no war, and law that knows no treason; and full of his spirit a grateful land shall gather round his grave, and, in the daily psalm of prosperous and righteous living, thank God forever for his life and death.

So let him lie here to-day, and let our people go and bend with solemn thoughtfulness and look upon his face and read the lessons of his burial. As he paused here on his journey from the Western home and told us what by the help of God he meant to do, so let him pause upon his way back to his Western grave and tell us, with a silence more eloquent than words, how bravely, how truly, by the strength of God, he did it. God brought him up as he brought David up from the sheepfolds to feed Jacob, his people, and Israel, his inheritance. He came up in earnestness and faith, and he goes back in triumph. As he pauses here to-day and from his cold lips bids us bear witness how he has met the duty that was laid on him, what can we say out of our full hearts but this "He fed them with a faithful and true heart, and ruled them prudently and with all his power."

The Shepherd of the People! that old name that the best rulers ever craved. What ruler ever won it like this dead President of ours? He fed us faithfully and truly. He fed us with counsel when we were in doubt, with inspiration when we sometimes faltered, with caution when we would be rash, with calm, clear, trusted cheerfulness through many an hour when our hearts were dark. He fed hungry souls all over the country with sympathy and consolation. He spread before the whole land feasts of great duty and devotion and patriotism, on which the land grew strong. He fed us with solemn, solid truths. He taught us the sacredness of government, the wickedness of treason. He made our souls glad and vigorous with the love. of liberty that was in his. He showed us how to love truth and yet be charitable-how to hate wrong and all oppression, and yet not treasure one personal injury or insult. He fed all his people, from the highest to the lowest, from the most privileged down to the most enslaved. Best of all, he fed us

with a reverent and genuine religion. He spread before us the love and fear of God just in that shape in which we need them most, and out of his faithful service of a higher Master who of us has not taken and eaten and grown strong? "He fed them with a faithful and true heart." Yes, till the last. For at the last, behold him standing with hand reached out to feed the South with mercy, and the North with charity, and the whole land with peace, when the Lord who had sent him called him, and his work was done!

He stood once on the battle-field of our own State, and said of the brave men who had saved it words as noble as any countryman of ours ever spoke. Let us stand in the country he has saved, and which is to be his grave and monument, and say of Abraham Lincoln what he said of the soldiers who had died at Gettysburg. He stood there with their graves before him, and these are the words he said:

We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far beyond our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from those honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

May God make us worthy of the memory of Abraham Lincoln !

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

LOUIS KOSSUTH

Address in which William Cullen Bryant introduced Louis Kossuth at the banquet given in honor of the Hungarian patriot by the Press of New York, December 9, 1851. Another address by Mr Bryant is given in Volume I.

GENTLEMEN :-Before announcing the third regular toast, which is a very short one, allow me to say a few words. Let me ask you to imagine that the contest in which the United States asserted their independence of Great Britain had closed in disaster and defeat; that our armies, through treason and a league of tyrants against us, had been broken and scattered; that the great men who led them, and who swayed our councils, our Washington, our Franklin, the venerable President of the American Congress, and their illustrious associates, had been driven forth as exiles. If there had existed at that day, in any part of the civilized world, a powerful republic, with institutions resting on the same foundations of liberty which our own countrymen sought to establish, would there have been in that republic any hospitality too cordial, any sympathy too deep, any zeal for their glorious but unfortunate cause too fervent or too active to be shown towards these illustrious fugitives? Gentlemen, the case I have supposed is before you. The Washingtons, the Franklins of Hungary, her sages, her legislators, her warriors, expelled by a far worse tyranny than was ever endured here, are wanderers in foreign lands. Some of them are within our own borders; one of them sits with his companions as our guest to-night, and we must measure the duty we owe them by the same standard which we would have had history apply, if our ancestors had met with a fate like theirs. I have compared the exiled Hungarians to the great men of

our own history. Difficulty, my brethren, is the nurse of greatness-a harsh nurse, who roughly rocks her foster-children into strength and athletic proportion. The mind, grappling with great aims and wrestling with mighty impediments, grows by a certain necessity to their stature. Scarce anything so convinces me of the capacity of the human intellect for indefinite expansion in the different stages of its being, as this power of enlarging itself to the height and compass of surrounding emergencies. These men have been trained to greatness by a quicker and surer method than a peaceful country and a tranquil period can know.

But it is not merely, or even principally, for their personal qualities that we honor them; we honor them for the cause in which they so gloriously failed. Great issues hung upon that cause, and great interests of mankind were crushed by its downfall. I was on the continent of Europe when the treason of Gorgey laid Hungary bound at the feet of the Czar. Europe was at that time in the midst of the reaction; the ebb tide was rushing violently back, sweeping all that the friends of freedom had planned into the black bosom of the deep. In France the liberty of the press was extinct; Paris was in a state of siege; the soldiery of that Republic had just quenched in blood the freedom of Rome; Austria had suppressed liberty in northern Italy; absolutism was restored in Prussia; along the Rhine and its tributaries, and in the towns and villages of Wurtemberg and Bavaria, troops withdrawn from the barracks and garrisons filled the streets and kept the inhabitants quiet with the bayonet at their breasts. Hungary, at that moment, alone upheld-and upheld with a firm hand and dauntless heart-the blazing torch of liberty. To Hungary were turned up the eyes, to Hungary clung the hopes of all who did not despair of the freedom of Europe.

I recollect that, while the armies of Russia were moving, like a tempest from the north, upon the Hungarian host, the progress of events was watched with the deepest solicitude by the people of Germany. I was at that time in Munich, the splendid capital of Bavaria. The Bavarians seemed for the time to have put off their usual character, and scrambled for the daily prints, wet from the press, with such eagerness that I