of earth, and principles of eternal right; judging potentates and laborers in the clear light of nature, and at ease with both; alone by virtue of a large and melancholy soul, at home with every man by virtue of love and faith,—­this figure takes its place high in our minds and hearts, not solely through the natural right of strength and success, but also because his strength is ours, and the success won by him rested on the fundamental purity and health of the popular will of which he was the leader and the servant.  Abraham Lincoln was in a deep and lasting sense the first American.”

Mr. John Bigelow, already quoted in these pages, summarized Lincoln’s character and achievements in a passage of singular eloquence and force.  “Lincoln’s greatness must be sought for in the constituents of his moral nature.  He was so modest by nature that he was perfectly content to walk behind any man who wished to walk before him.  I do not know that history has made a record of the attainment of any corresponding eminence by any other man who so habitually, so constitutionally, did to others as he would have them do to him.  Without any pretensions to religious excellence, from the time he first was brought under the observation of the nation he seemed, like Milton, to have walked ’as ever in his great Taskmaster’s eye.’  St. Paul hardly endured more indignities and buffetings without complaint.  He was not a learned man.  He was not even one who would deserve to be called in our day an educated man—­knew little rather than much of what the world is proud of.  He had never been out of the United States, or seen much of the portion of them lying east of the Alleghany Mountains.  But the spiritual side of his nature was so highly organized that it rendered superfluous much of the experience which to most men is indispensable—­the choicest prerogative of genius.  It lifted him unconsciously above the world, above most of the men who surrounded him, and gave him a wisdom in emergencies which is bestowed only on those who love their fellow-man as themselves....  In the ordinary sense of the word, Mr. Lincoln was not a statesman.  Had he come to power when Van Buren did, or when Cleveland did, he would probably have left Washington at the close of his term as obscure as either of them.  The issues presented to the people of the United States at the Presidential election of 1860 were to a larger extent moral questions, humanly speaking, than were those presented at any other Presidential election.  They were:  first, the right of the majority to rule; second, the right of eight millions, more or less, of our fellow-beings to their freedom; and, third, the institutions and traditions which Washington planted and Jefferson watered, with the sacrifices necessary for their preservation.  These questions subordinated all other political issues, and appealed more directly and forcibly to the moral sentiments of this nation than any issues they had ever before been called to settle either at the ballot-box or by force of arms.  A President was needed at Washington to represent these moral forces.  Such a President was providentially found in Lincoln ... a President who walked by faith and not by sight; who did not rely upon his own compass, but followed a cloud by day and a fire by night, which he had learned to trust implicitly.”