and complicated questions of foreign and domestic policy which
immediately arose, and continued to press upon him during the rest of his
life; but he mastered each as it came, apparently with the facility of a
trained and experienced ruler. As Clarendon said of Cromwell, "His parts
seemed to be raised by the demands of great station." His life through
it all was one of intense labor, anxiety, and distress, without one hour
of peaceful repose from first to last. But he rose to every occasion.
He led public opinion, but did not march so far in advance of it as to
fail of its effective support in every great emergency. He knew the
heart and thought of the people, as no man not in constant and absolute
sympathy with them could have known it, and so holding their confidence,
he triumphed through and with them. Not only was there this steady
growth of intellect, but the infinite delicacy of his nature and its
capacity for refinement developed also, as exhibited in the purity and
perfection of his language and style of speech. The rough backwoodsman,
who had never seen the inside of a university, became in the end, by
self-training and the exercise of his own powers of mind, heart, and
soul, a master of style, and some of his utterances will rank with the
best, the most perfectly adapted to the occasion which produced them.

Have you time to listen to his two-minutes speech at Gettysburg, at the
dedication of the Soldiers' Cemetery? His whole soul was in it:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a
great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived
and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of
that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final
resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might