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ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

To the Hon. Thomas H. Nelson, Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary from the United States of America to Chili, as a slight testimony of sincere friendship and profound sympathy with him in his just sorrow for the irreparable loss suffered by America in the death of ABRAHAM LINCOLN, sixteenth President of the United States.

"One mournful wail is heard from shore to shore,

A Nation's heart is stricken to the core;

And Freedom, kneeling with uncovered head,

Weeps by the altar of Our Country's Dead."

ALBERT EVANS-On the Death of President Lincoln.

I.

A sudden and overwhelming calamity has befallen America!

The bells of all the cities have tolled mournfully; the flags of all nations have been draped with the habiliments of woe; all countenances display deep anguish; days of humiliation, fasting and prayer have been observed by all creeds-in a word, it may be said, without hyperbole, that the world discovered by Columbus has been overwhelmed with grief.

And wherefore ?

Is it perchance that tidings of some unheard-of catastrophe have been received at the same time throughout all countries? Of fire, shipwreck, pestilence, overwhelming inundations ? What fearful plague has the wrath of Heaven let loose upon the earth? Alas! it is none of

these which make men's hearts grow faint and their foreheads bow low beneath the chastening rod! The horror of all that is about us has effaced from our minds horror itself. And therefore it is that the most sanguinary battles fail to agonize the soul, that the martyrdom of a people in one grand conflagration does not receive the poor tribute of a memorial stone, and that the sudden disappearance of a city reduced to atoms causes neither dread nor wonder. Man of the present day, placed in the vast camp of ruins called life, seems more wonder-stricken at his own existence than at the unceasing destruction of all created things, as he sees opening before his feet, ever brilliant, ever fleeting, like the ignis fatuus, that other chimera, the smiling mask of death-styled futurity. What, then, has occurred ?

Alas! That which has caused this deep, instantaneous, irrepressible sorrow in the hearts of all men-that which has made the old man, the child and the maiden alike leave their dwellings in search of the sad tidingsthat which has clothed all cities in mourning, and transformed the whole of America, moved by one common sentiment, into one single altar for public prayer, into one sepulchre-is the death of an HONEST MAN!

II.

Yes; Abraham Lincoln was not one of those great and terrible beings known in history as Cæsar and Hannibal, Charlemagne and Napoleon. His shoulders knew no robes more regal than the simple dress of a citizen; no crown encircled his forehead, save the sweat of rude and honest toil; his arm wielded no other weapon than the axe which felled the forest trees, that the ground they shaded might yield the sweet fruits of the earth. He was, on the contrary, that almost unknown being, an humblé apostle who had emerged from the forests of the Great West to sit in the Capitol of the Rome of free ages, and standing on the topmost of its steps, as it were on the Sinai of Holy Writ, spoke to a multitude of down-trodden beings grovelling in the vilest servitude, or weighed down by the chains placed upon them by the strong, and said to them: "Be men! for there is but one humanity. Be Christians! for there is but one God."

III.

There are men who have no ancestry and need them not. The world is their country-the human race their family. Abraham Lincoln was one of that class. No one knows with certainty from whence he came. All eyes are turned to the bright place whither he is going. His baptismal certificate would appear to be inscribed in the vault of that heaven whose brilliant rays illuminate his redeeming march; and, therefore, as he falls on one side. the victim of an assassin's stroke, he is seen to rise, crowned with resplendent lights, to ascend to the highest place in the Kingdom of the Just!

The earthly life of such grand spirits is not an existence: it is a mission. Hence it is, that they make their appearance but at the interval of centuries. Between the initiatory mission of George Washington and the culminating mission of Abraham Lincoln, the American race had passed through an entire era.

The colonist and the slave were the two extremes of that grand spiritual transformation of the inhabited globe known as "Democracy."

Washington changed the first into a citizen, and passed away, great, sublime, almost sanctified, to be claimed by all ages.

Lincoln changed the second into a man, and for this he falls a martyr; the whole earth his sepulchre.

Heroes in goodness! Blessed be ye throughout all ages and amongst all men !

IV.

But who was Abraham Lincoln, as a moral being and as a character, as the living agent of that supreme goodness which seemed to be incorporated with, and a very part of, his immortal spirit? That is what we shall endeavor to show in these hastily prepared lines. Some incidents, made known by sorrowing and absent friends, and a few of those pages, covered with the emblems of mourning, which have been scattered by the press, are all that we have with which to delineate to our countrymen that noble figure of goodness, which should be attempted only by the greatest artists, and not by our feeble hand.

V.

Abraham Lincoln was born in the midst of the primeval forests of America, on the banks of the Ohio, and not far from the Mississippi, the first the finest, and the other the largest of North American rivers. His father was a laborer; his grandfather was a colonist-soldier, and perished at his own door, while defending his home from the savages. In the midst of those Kentucky woods, on the 12th of February, 1809, came into the world, he whose name, for ages to come, shall never be uttered save with the veneration inspired by the great Redeemer's, with the love felt for all public benefactors, and with the sorrow due to all sublime martyrs.

"Abraham Lincoln (said one of the journals opposed to him, as in mockery of his humble origin), this honest old lawyer, with face half Roman, half Indian, passed his first years in the western wilds, grappling with remonstrating bears, and looking out for the too frequent rattlesnake. Tall, strong, lithe and smiling, Abe toiled on as farmlaborer, mule-driver, sheep-feeder, deer-killer, wood-cutter, and, lastly, as boatman on the waters of the Wabash and the Mississippi."

VI.

Such was the childhood and youth of Abraham Lin-coln. When but seven years of age, in 1816, he left the Kentucky forests on the southern bank of the Ohio, for those on the other side of the river in the State of Indiana. Fourteen years later, in 1830, he again moved from the Indiana forests into the still more savage ones of Illinois, on the confines of the region then inhabited by the savages whose arrow's had, years before, caused the death of his grandsire. These two trips, or rather this progressive march of the Western settler, which marked two epochs in the obscure life of Abraham Lincoln, had presented but one contrast, but one simple and natural change-which was, that in the first he was carried by his father with the rest of his family, in a wagon drawn by oxen, whilst in the latter, it was he who, being more fit for work, guided the vehicle which carried his household goods to the Far West.

On his arrival in Illinois, the young settler found himself-as had his grandfather-with gun in hand, to resist the invasion of the aboriginal tribes. In the war with the Indians, known as the Black Hawk War, he was elected by his companions Captain of Volunteers.

VII.

During all this time, Abraham Lincoln had been to school but for six months. But there are beings who derive their learning from all that they see, or that they hear, or that comes into their hands, whether printed or written-books, newspapers, paintings, objects of nature, -in a word, all that can be acquired from books, as ideas or as syntheses; and Abraham Lincoln's was one of those deep minds which gather, from observation and comparison, an immense store of intellectual wealth and practical knowledge.

By said means, Abraham Lincoln became a lawyer in 1835.

He was not a lawyer graduated at a University; he had no diploma, and could scarcely count twenty-seven years of a poor and uneventful life; but the moral power which was raising him to the glorious end in store for him, soon placed him at the summit of the profession which he had

selected.

In 1845, Abraham Lincoln was the best lawyer in the State of Illinois.

VIII.

But Abraham Lincoln was not like all other lawyers. Having had no masters, neither had he colleagues, nor numerous but haughty clients, such as gather round the jurists in vogue. For him, the Forum was not an arena for ambition, nor a field camp in which to strive for scholastic renown; it was not even the tribunal of science, and much less the place for acquiring wealth. It was something nobler, for he was more humble and disinterested. For that athlete of the forests, the Forum was the tribunal of God's justice; it was the throne of the law, sublime goddess of that modern paganism, stigmatized by Rome, called Human Democracy, simple formula of the Old Gospel which proclaimed the equality of men; it was,

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