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THE GREEN BAG
Everything he writes has a literary qual ity and distinction. His brief eulogies of Lincoln, Grant, and Logan, are prose poems. In the "Lincoln" he said: "Ideal characters cannot be made to order. They must stand for something more than accident, for something better than titles and dignities. "Abraham Lincoln outshines the Plantagenets and ennobles common blood forevermore. "He was great, not knowing his own greatness. In him common sense took on flesh and blood. Rooted in humble soil his life grew and strengthened and uncon sciously blossomed into fame. "When, in 1858, he made that memorable canvass of Illinois, the Republican party was a great instrument, discordant and un tuned. He touched its chords, and straight way a nation leaped into life to follow its enchanting strains. No herald announced his coming, no trumpet sounded when a new Agamemnon rose from the prairies. 'Is not a man better than a town?' asks Emerson. Verily, Abraham Lincoln, pro claiming the truth that had just begun to dawn, was more than a city with all its domes and turrets flashing against the sky. . "History has given Abraham Lincoln a unique place. He had power greater than king or emperor, and he used it as modestly as a village pastor might wield his influence over a rural congregation. -He was granite for the right, but yielding as water when common sorrows touched his own sad heart. "He was above all things a man; strong, resolute, modest, too great to be proud, too deeply introspective not to see his own limitations and his own possibilities. No ruler by divine right ever had more true dignity; no laborer driving his team afield more true humility. As Abraham Lincoln, he never forgot that he was president; as president, he never forgot that he was Abraham Lincoln. "Out of the nightmare of the war, clear cut against the April sky, there rose a
figure for which he had longed by night and by day. It was the figure of a nation. The camp, the march, the battle, and the prison had upreared its walls. No contract made it. No parchment can define all its powers or limit its possibilities. It is suf ficient unto itself. Not States but people gave it life, and not States but people must perpetuate it. It preceded and will survive the written formulas which are the husk, and not the kernel, of constitutional govern ment." In his dedication of the Statue of Grant, is this passage: "I would not take from that noble life one little flaw through which the real brightness of his character shines more plainly. Victory is sweet to a soldier's heart. When Lee surrendered, the measure of success was heaped and crowded for U. S. Grant. He had won for all time the fame of a great general. But he was some thing more than a great general when in that hour he bade the weary soldiers he had fought so long to go back to their farms and cotton fields, and build up their broken fortunes. It was an act such as poets love, when they sing of Arthur and the Table Round, or of the fabled Cid whose gentle hands bound up the wounds his own right arm had made. Whatever it meant to others, to Grant Appomattox meant only peace. Some blossom from the famous apple tree dropped into the old com mander's heart, and filled it with the sweetness of the Spring." And in the Logan address are these sentences : "Anniversaries are harmonies; and, in observing them, we set history to music." "Behold the bronze epic! Arma virumque to all who shall gaze on these heroic fea tures." "Art has a subtle vision. It worships beauty. Poems and songs are links which unite it to Nature, and to human nature, which is the flower of all things. It puts light and color upon canvass, only that the
