fit to take a place by the side of Everett's silver sentences? He
sighed. Yet the people had a right to the best he could give, and he
would give them his best; at least he could see to it that the words
were real and were short; at least he would not, so, exhaust their
patience. And the work might as well be done now in the leisure of the
journey. He put a hand, big, powerful, labor-knotted, into first one
sagging pocket and then another, in search of a pencil, and drew out
one broken across the end. He glanced about inquiringly--there was
nothing to write upon. Across the car the Secretary of State had just
opened a package of books and their wrapping of brown paper lay on
the floor, torn carelessly in a zigzag. The President stretched a long
arm.

"Mr. Seward, may I have this to do a little writing?" he asked, and
the Secretary protested, insisting on finding better material.

But Lincoln, with few words, had his way, and soon the untidy stump
of a pencil was at work and the great head, the deep-lined face, bent
over Seward's bit of brown paper, the whole man absorbed in his task.

Earnestly, with that "capacity for taking infinite pains" which
has been defined as genius, he labored as the hours flew, building
together close-fitted word on word, sentence on sentence. As the
sculptor must dream the statue prisoned in the marble, as the artist
must dream the picture to come from the brilliant unmeaning of his
palette, as the musician dreams a song, so he who writes must have a
vision of his finished work before he touches, to begin it, a
medium more elastic, more vivid, more powerful than any
other--words--prismatic bits of humanity, old as the Pharaohs, new as
the Arabs of the street, broken, sparkling, alive, from the age-long