While the people sympathized with the bereaved family of the martyred President, and those who had been made widows during the war sympathized deeply with Mrs. Lincoln (to whom even the Queen of England sent an autograph letter, assuring her of the sympathy of a widowed heart), yet it was not only as those who felt for others that the people mourned. They had themselves lost a friend. They mourned with a sense of personal bereavement. Many families, whose dear ones, though exposed to the perils of the battle-field, the prison, and the hospital, had yet returned safely to their homes, now felt that they had some one for whom to weep; since President Lincoln belonged to all. Sublime utterances of faith in God, tender expressions of love for the departed, and words of solemn instruction, were heard on this day of mourning; and each loyal hand that held "the pen of a ready writer was moved to add a tribute to the memory of the nation's martyr. Mrs. Stowe, after speaking of the rejoicings over victory, adds,

"But this our joy has been ordained to be changed into a wail of sorrow. The kind hard hand that held the helm so steadily in the desperate tossings of the storm has been stricken down just as we entered port; the fatherly heart that bore all our sorrows can take no earthly part in our joys. His were the cares, the watchings, the toils, the agonies, of a nation in mortal struggle; and God looking down was so well pleased with his humble faithfulness, his patient continuance in well-doing, that earthly rewards and honors seemed all too poor for him; so he reached down, and took him to immortal glories. 'Well done, good and faithful servant! enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.'"*

• "Atlantic Monthly," August, 1865.

The remains of the President were borne from Washington to Springfield, where they were finally deposited, by way of Baltimore, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, New York, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, and Chicago, — a distance in circuit of about eighteen hundred miles. All along the route, the people gathered with va rious testimonials of respect, and evidences of grief that was great and sincere.

The body rested, while in Philadelphia, in that hall, around which cluster so many historical memories, and over which, four years before, the President raised the flag of our country. "The bier was close to the famous old Liberty Bell, which first sounded forth, in 1776, the tidings of independence.

"The interior of the hall, as well as the exterior, was heavily draped and most artistically illuminated. Around the remains were appropriate decorations, leaves of exquisite evergreens, and flowers of an exquisite crimson bloom. At the head of the corpse were bouquets; beneath, the flaming tapers at the feet; from the elabo rately hung walls, the portraits of the great and good dead were eloquent in their silence, and seemed to say that not one of the great actors of other eras, preserved in canvas, marble, and metal, looking down like living mourners on that honored catafalque, ever filled his space with more dignity than the dead Lincoln. Not Columbus from his brazen door; not De Soto planting his cross on the Mississippi; not Pocahontas; not Miles Standish on the "Mayflower;" not William Penn making peace with the Indians; not Benjamin Franklin in his philosophy; not the fiery Patrick Henry as he ejaculated his war-cry in the Virginia House of Delegates, nor John Adams as he shouted it in Boston; not Washington with his sword; nor Jefferson with his pen; nor Hamilton with

his statesmanship; nor John Jay; nor John Marshall, the purest jurist of our earlier or later history; nor Perry, the sea-king of 1812, riding on billows of blood through a line of blazing ships; nor Jackson, with his triple triumph over savage and Briton and the spirit of incipient treason, not one was more worthy of the genius of the' poet, the painter, the sculptor, and the orator, than the gentle and illustrious patriot whose virtues and whose genius the American people now mourn."*

The limits of this volume will not permit further mention of the funeral honors. Suffice it to say that they were such as were never paid to mortal before, and showed, in some degree, the depth of the national

sorrow.

Foreign nations sympathized with us in our national loss. While those who had voted against the President now mourned as sincerely as any his sad and sudden death, the event awoke sorrow in hearts abroad which had sometimes throbbed in sympathy with our enemies. England spoke through her press in terms of abhorrence that such a crime had been committed, and in words of eulogy concerning the martyred one. Earl Russell announced to the House of Lords the private letter of Queen Victoria to the President's widow. Earl Derby followed with words of sympathy.

France joined in the general horror of the crime, and sympathy with the mourners. Henri Martin, the historian, wrote an article, headed, "A great Martyr of Democracy," commencing, "Slavery, before expiring, has gathered up the remnants of its strength and rage to strike a coward blow at its conqueror." In Italy, Belgium, and Prussia, suitable notice was taken of the sorrow

* "Lincoln Memorial," p. 176.

ful event. In Portugal, a most eloquent address was delivered in the Chamber of Peers, at Lisbon, by Sr. Rebello da Silva, from which is given the following extract:

"Lincoln, martyr to the broad principle which he represented in power and struggle, belongs now to history and to posterity. Like Washington, whose idea he continued, his name will be inseparable from the memorable epochs to which he is bound, and which he expresses. If the defender of independence freed America, Lincoln unsheathed without hesitation the sword of the Republic, and with its point erased and tore out from the statutes of a free people the anti-social stigma, the anti-humanitarian blasphemy, the sad, shameful, infamous codicil of old societies, the dark, repugnant abuse of slavery, which Jesus Christ first condemned from the top of the cross, proclaiming the equality of man before God, which nineteen centuries of civilization, reared in the gospel, have proscribed and rejected as the opprobrium of our times."

"At the moment when he was breaking the chains of a luckless race; when he was seeing in millions of rehabili tated slaves millions of future citizens; when the bronze voice of Grant's victorious cannon was proclaiming the emancipation of the soul, of the conscience, and of toil; when the scourge was about to fall from the hands of the scourgers; when the ancient slave-pen was about to be transformed, for the captive, into a domestic altar; at the moment when the stars of the Union, sparkling and resplendent with the golden fires of Liberty, were wav ing over the subdued walls of Petersburg and Richmond, . . . the sepulchre opens, and the strong, the powerful, enters it. In the midst of triumphs and accla mations, there appeared to him a spectre like that of

Cæsar in the Ides of March, saying to him, 'You have lived!'

"Have lived! Yes, Lincoln did live once, in the body; and thank God, who hath made man immortal, he liveth still. He lives! He lives! He lives to-day in his imperishable example, in his recorded words of wisdom, in his great maxims of liberty and enfranchisement.

"The good never die; to them belongs endurable immortality; they perish not upon the earth, and they exist forever in heaven. The good of the present live in the future, as the good of the past are here with us and in us to-day. The great primeval lawgiver, entombed for forty centuries in that unknown grave in an obscure vale of Moab, to-day legislates in your halls of state, and preaches on all your sabbaths in your synagogues. Salem's royal singer indites our liturgies, and leads our worship. Socrates questions atheists in these streets. Phidias sculptures the friezes of Christian temples; the desecrated tongue of mangled Tully arraigns our Catilines; against the Philip of to-day the dead Demosthenes thunders; the dead Leonidas guards the gates of every empire which wrestles for its sovereignty; the dead Justinian issues in your country the living mandates of the law; the dead Martin Luther issues from your press the living oracles of God; the dead Napoleon sways France from that silent throne in the Invalides; the dead George Washington held together through wrangling decades this brotherhood of States; and the dead ABRAHAM LINCOLN will peal the clarion of beleagured nations, and marshal and beckon on the wavering battle line of liberty till the last generation of man

'Shall creation's death behold

As Adam saw her prime.'