patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust, in the best way, all our present difficulty.

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.  The Government will not assail you.  You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.  You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government; while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend” it.

I am loth to close.  We are not enemies, but friends.  We must not be enemies.  Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection.  The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

At the close of the address, which was delivered with the utmost earnestness and solemnity, Lincoln, “with reverent look and impressive emphasis, repeated the oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of his country.  Douglas, who knew the conspirators and their plots, with patriotic magnanimity then grasped the hand of the President, gracefully extended his congratulations, and the assurance that in the dark future he would stand by him, and give to him his utmost aid in upholding the Constitution and enforcing the laws of his country.”

“At the inauguration,” says Congressman Riddle, “I stood within a yard of Mr. Lincoln when he pronounced his famous address.  How full of life and power it then was, with the unction of his utterance!  Surely, we thought, the South, which rejected the concessions of Congress, would accept him.  How dry and quaint, yet ingenious, much of that inaugural appears to me now, when the life and soul seem to have gone out of it!  A sad thing—­a spectre of the day—­will forever haunt my memory:  Poor old President Buchanan, short, stout, pale, white-haired, yet bearing himself resolutely throughout, linked by the arm to the new President, into whom from himself was passing the qualifying unction of the Constitution, jostled hither and thither, as already out of men’s sight, yet bravely maintaining the shadow of dignity and place.  How glad he must have been to take leave of his successor at the White House when all was ended!”

The formalities of the inauguration concluded, Lincoln passed back through the Senate Chamber, and, again escorted by Mr. Buchanan, was conducted to the White House, where the cares and anxieties of his position immediately descended upon him.  “Strange indeed,” says General Logan, “must have been the thoughts that crowded through the brain and oppressed the heart of Abraham Lincoln that night—­his first at the White House.  The City of Washington swarmed with rebels and rebel sympathizers, and all