to say that Abraham Lincoln was more human than William Lloyd Garrison?  Does not every one know that it was the practical Free-Soilers who made emancipation possible, and not the hot, impracticable Abolitionists; that the country was infinitely more moved by Lincoln’s temperate sagacity than by any man’s enthusiasm, instinctively trusted the man who saw the whole situation and kept his balance, instinctively held off from those who refused to see more than one thing?  We know how serviceable the intense and headlong agitator was in bringing to their feet men fit for action; but we feel uneasy while he lives, and vouchsafe him our full sympathy only when he is dead.  We know that the genial forces of nature which work daily, equably, and without violence are infinitely more serviceable, infinitely more admirable, than the rude violence of the storm, however necessary or excellent the purification it may have wrought.  Should we seek to name the most human man among those who let the nation to its struggle with slavery, and yet was no statesmen, we should, of course, name Lowell.  We know that his humor went further than any man’s passion toward setting tolerant men atingle with the new impulses of the day.  We naturally hold back from those who are intemperate and can never stop to smile, and are deeply reassured to see a twinkle in a reformer’s eye.  We are glad to see earnest men laugh.  It breaks the strain.  If it be wholesome laughter, it dispels all suspicion of spite, and is like the gleam of light upon running water, lifting sullen shadows, suggesting clear depths.

Surely it is this soundness of nature, this broad and genial quality, this full-blooded, full-orbed sanity of spirit, which gives the men we love that wide-eyed sympathy which gives hope and power to humanity, which gives range to every good quality and is so excellent a credential of genuine manhood.  Let your life and your thought be narrow, and your sympathy will shrink to a like scale.  It is a quality which follows the seeing mind afield, which waits on experience.  It is not a mere sentiment.  It goes not with pity so much as with a penetrative understanding of other men’s lives and hopes and temptations.  Ignorance of these things makes it worthless.  Its best tutors are observations and experience, and these serve only those who keep clear eyes and a wide field of vision.  It is exercise and discipline upon such a scale, too, which strengthen, which for ordinary men come near to creating, that capacity to reason upon affairs and to plan for action which we always reckon upon finding in every man who has studied to perfect his native force.  This new day in which we live cries a challenge to us.  Steam and electricity have reduced nations to neighborhoods; have made travel pastime, and news a thing for everybody.  Cheap printing has made knowledge a vulgar commodity.  Our eyes look, almost without choice, upon the very world itself, and the word “human” is filled with new