“The Highest Merit to the Soldier.”
“This extraordinary war in which we are engaged falls heavily upon all classes of people, but the most heavily upon the soldier. For it has been said, ‘All that a man hath he will give for his life;’ and, while all contribute of their substance, the soldier puts his life at stake, and often yields it up in his country’s cause. The highest merit, then, is due to the soldier.”
“HOW SLEEP THE BRAVE?”
If Lincoln did not possess a wide range of reading, he had the habit of committing to memory entire pages of the text he delighted in. The consequence was his invariable ability to not only utter apt quotations at length, but to cap them, if need be. Joining a group of visitors to Washington, at the Soldiers’ Home, during the war, he suddenly, but in an undertone, murmured:
How sleep the brave who sink to rest
By all their country’s wishes blest?
The women were affected to tears by their susceptible nature, the surroundings of the cemetery with its graves, the evening dusk, and the touching voice with its apposite lines. An effect he redoubled by concluding:
And women o’er the graves shall weep,
Where nameless heroes calmly sleep!