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DISCOURSE.

What mean these sable symbols of mourning? Why this House of God draped? Why that Flag-the emblem of our national life and power-why wears it the weeds of marked grief? Why this large and solemn gathering? Why these prayers and dirges lifted to Heaven through our tears?

You tell me they utter, one and all, the fact of Death, and are signs of uncommon sorrow.

Why these symbols and sepulchral pall? Why do your hearts

But who of your dear ones is recently dead? Into whose home has the grim messenger entered of late and made new havoc with your hearts, in smiting down some illustrious, shining victim, and hence waked this wail of mourning, this quite universal, crushing grief, in our quiet New England home? Who of us have recently lost a loved one? I see no coffin. You have not brought with you into the House of Prayer the dear remains of any dear departed one. of anomalous grief? Why this dark Why your faces covered with tears? ache as if they must break, or you die? Lo! What do I see, all over our land, where Loyalty and Freedom remain, where are yet found hearts true to God and to law-abiding Liberty, what do I see? Thousands and thousands of my countrymen gathered in the Holy Sanctuary, and at the toll of bells so lately rung in pealing and joyful tones, are assembled, with sad hearts and amid the same insignia of profound and unut

terable sorrow and even woe, to utter their prayers and their sighs in the ear of Heaven-whence any true comfort can come. Why all this I ask you? Ah! following the lines that radiate from the heart-centre of our national existence, in streams of mourners, we reach inward and approach the home of power and national glory and attraction, and pressing our way through the dense crowds of living, gloomy men, women and children of every race and color, we, with solemn tread draw near a sarcophagus-a coffin-surrounded with the mightiest of the land-scarred and war-beaten soldiers-warriors, whose names "the world will never let die," statesmen of the ripest intellect and of the holiest worth, with grey locks whitened in the service of their country-weeping like children and mingling in one refrain of anguish, their sobs, with a family group, who but a week since were all on the very summit of joy, but now, with broken, crushed hearts, are about to bear away their loved and honored one to his old home. Sadly we lift the covering, and O my soul, who lies therein? I need not tell you. His face is as familiar, though we may never have looked upon it, is as familiar as the face of any dear and near friend-that face marked with honest plainness, with inherent strength, and with serene and smiling grace, you recognize it and whore is it? Alas, alas, it is the face of him, though we had seen him not, we loved-esteemed more and more, and of whom we can truly say we did not know till now how much we loved him and how our hearts confided in him, our worthy, humane, honest, stout, true and Christian President-the leader under God, as ever Moses was of Israel, of this American people and yet who like Moses permitted to view from Pisgah's top the beauty of the Land of Promise, and not himself enter in. So our leader dies within fair sight of his hoped-for good, dies just as he was writing on the undying page of history, my country saved from the mad assault of Treason. But how is this? Is he dead? How? O my country weep. in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Ashkalon, dies indeed,

Tell it not

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by the permissive Providence of God, overruling all in utmost wisdom, though dark to us, yet smitten down in a moment by one of our own countrymen, impelled and frenzied by the murderous spirit of the most unjust and foulest rebellion that ever saturated the earth with its blood, and has now culminated in the fiendish assassination of our Chief Magistrate !

This then is the reason of this assemblage. This is the occasion of all this sable drapery and mourning and tears, this wide-spread grief. It is fitting indeed, that we, with the nation, should come into the house of the Lord and cluster about the altar of prayer, here bow down our hearts in submission at the foot of adorable Sovereignty and Mercy and through our tears look up to Him, our Father God, whence our hope and help must come.

And who can help mourning, and more deeply mourn that he should die at this critical and yet hopeful juncture in our national struggle against the vile spirit that inflamed the heart of Treason, that nerved the arm of the foul invader, opened the blood-gate of war and has now, as its legitimate and mad work, struck with an assassin's hand at the very heart of the nation-of all true and Constitutional law and order in the land. This aggravates and intensifies our grief. This adds the emotions of horror and of just indignation to our sorWe shudder as we weep, as the deed apprehended, and yet we never could believe there was a heart depraved or arm Satanic enough to consummate, has been accomplished!

row.

And yet the deed is done, no worse in spirit or in fact, than the spirit and fact of the rebellion that prompted it, that threatoned he should never take his seat at the Capital, threatened to overthrow this Government and tumble our free institutions into chaos, yet it is done! There in yonder coffin, I see, through blurred eyes, our good, noble, magnanimous, National Representative lies, calm and sweet in death, his all-guiding and great spirit wafted away from the tumult and care and madness and joy of earth, and may we not hope through the mercy of

that adorable Jesus whom he loved, and that God whom he ever recognized, is safe where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.

He is no more! His ear is deaf to the shouts of welcome at his presence, or now to the wail of wild and unutterable grief that bursts from the bruised heart of his companion and children. His eye is closed upon the rising glories of his emancipated country. He has listened for the last time to the glad voices of Victory as they leap and swell over the land. He is no more, ah! can we say this? Nay, never was he so all pervasive as to-day. We see and feel him in our dreams. "Though dead he yet speaketh." He cannot die out on earth even. The green sods, as they grow greener and more fresh over his grave, can never muffle his voice or bury his memory and wisdom. His name and fame are immortal.

And yet he is gone, and we weep and mourn like children, and we can't help it, for we esteemed and loved him. The blow that struck him, strnck us. We all feel weak. Our limbs tremble underneath us. We sink down and cry after him, My Father! My Father! the chariot of Israel and the horse-men thereof! Our hearts quake, fears take hold of us as of a woman in travail. We know not what will be on the morrow. We seem to stand upon the perilous edge [of some deep and dark abyss, whose mad waters swirl and cast their icy spray over us, and into it are plunging our hopes, our liberties-our free institutions-all that we hold dear on earth. For the spirit that maddened the assassin's brain, still lives in our land. Thousands we fear are glad that the deed is done, and dared they, would tumble our Government into one vast heap of ruin and raise upon it, in the glee of Devils, the black banner of anarchy and old night. What was intended and attempted, more than was accomplished, is sad proof of this. We thank Heaven for its sparing favor. May the life and strength of our new President and his constitutional advisers be precious in its sight!

But what a fall is this from the height of hope and joy that we had reached one week ago! How inexpressibly different the scene, amid the triumphant waving of the nation's banner upon the captured walls of Sumpter, and that awful scene when amid the music and merriment of the hour a single pistal shot is heard, the instantaneous unconsciousness of our President, his head dropped on his breast, the scream of a widowed woman, and the deep death slumbers of her noble and honored husband!

"How has the mighty fallen."

Many noble and dear brave ones have fallen before, and we had thought our grief so deep as not to be moved with a deeper sorrow, and yet we mourn to-day as never before, fulfilling to the letter the words of the holy Prophet at the death of Israel's beloved King. "In that day shall there be a great mourning in Jerusalem, as the mourning of Hadradrimmon in the valley of Megiddon. And the land shall mourn every family and their wives apart, the family of the house of Nathan apart and their wives apart, the family of Levi apart and their wives apart, the family of Shimei apart and their wives apart. All the families that remain and their wives apart." So it is this day.

But amid this quite universal gloom, what voice above our wail do I hear, if not the voice of Heaven speaking to us, in the words of the great Massilon, at the funeral of his beloved King, contrasting the weakness of the monarch with the immutability of God, God alone is great! He lives and rules! So when Jehovah was pleased to command the Prophet Isaiah to make a public proclamation in the ears of the people, what was it, think you, he was ordered to announce? The voice said cry, and he said what shall I cry? All flesh is grass and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field! The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it. Surely the people is grass. The grass

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