The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here,
but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the
living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which
they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is
rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining
before us, that from these honored dead we take increased
devotion to the cause for which they gave the last full measure
of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall
not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a
new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the
people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
--Speech at Gettysburg
[Illustration: ABRAHAM LINCOLN]
No, dearie, I do not think my childhood differed much from that of other
good healthy country youngsters. I've heard folks say that childhood has
its sorrows and all that, but the sorrows of country children do not last
long. The young rustic goes out and tells his troubles to the birds and
flowers, and the flowers nod in recognition, and the robin that sings from
the top of a tall poplar-tree when the sun goes down says plainly it has
sorrows of its own--and understands.
I feel a pity for all those folks who were born in a big city, and thus
got cheated out of their childhood. Zealous ash-box inspectors in gilt
braid, prying policemen with clubs, and signs reading, "Keep Off the
Grass," are woeful things to greet the gaze of little souls fresh from
God.
Last Summer six "Fresh Airs" were sent out to my farm, from the Eighth
Ward. Half an hour after their arrival, one of them, a little girl five
years old, who had constituted herself mother of the party, came rushing
into the house exclaiming, "Say, Mister, Jimmy Driscoll he's walkin' on de
grass!"
I well remember the first Keep-Off-the-Grass sign I ever saw. It was in a
printed book; it wasn't exactly a sign, only a picture of a sign, and the
single excuse I could think of for such a notice was that the field was
full of bumblebee-nests, and the owner, being a good man and kind, did not
want barefoot boys to add bee-stings to stone-bruises. And I never now see
one of those signs but that I glance at my feet to make sure that I have
shoes on.
Given the liberty of the country, the child is very near to Nature's
heart; he is brother to the tree and calls all the dumb, growing things by
name. He is sublimely superstitious. His imagination, as yet untouched by
disillusion, makes good all that earth lacks, and habited in a healthy
body the soul sings and soars.
In childhood, magic and mystery lie close around us. The world in which we
live is a panorama of constantly unfolding delights, our faith in the
Unknown is limitless, and the words of Job, uttered in mankind's early
morning, fit our wondering mood: "He stretcheth out the north over empty
space, and hangeth the earth upon nothing."
I am old, dearie, very old. In my childhood much of the State of Illinois
was a prairie, where wild grass waved and bowed before the breeze, like
the tide of a summer sea. I remember when "relatives" rode miles and miles
in springless farm-wagons to visit cousins, taking the whole family and
staying two nights and a day; when books were things to be read; when the
beaver and the buffalo were not extinct; when wild pigeons came in clouds
that shadowed the sun; when steamboats ran on the Sangamon; when Bishop
Simpson preached; when Hell was a place, not a theory, and Heaven a
locality whose fortunate inhabitants had no work to do; when Chicago
newspapers were ten cents each; when cotton cloth was fifty cents a yard,
and my shirt was made from a flour-sack, with the legend, "Extra XXX,"
across my proud bosom, and just below the words in flaming red, "Warranted
Fifty Pounds!"
The mornings usually opened with smothered protests against getting up,
for country folks then were extremists in the matter of "early to bed,
early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise." We hadn't much
wealth, nor were we very wise, but we had health to burn. But aside from
the unpleasantness of early morning, the day was full of possibilities of
curious things to be found in the barn and under spreading
gooseberry-bushes, or if it rained, the garret was an Alsatia unexplored.
The evolution of the individual mirrors the evolution of the race. In the
morning of the world man was innocent and free; but when
self-consciousness crept in and he possessed himself of that disturbing
motto, "Know Thyself," he took a fall.
Yet knowledge usually comes to us with a shock, just as the mixture
crystallizes when the chemist gives the jar a tap. We grow by throes.