Here is something at once most imposing and most engaging. Here is handicraft of the highest grade. The man that conceived and drafted that political appeal was, in the realm of politics, no mean architect. He is, in these arguments, measuring the forces elemental in a great Republic, as Michael Angelo measured gravitation. He is dealing with decades, and with centuries, with freedom and with slaves, with a transient Congress and the course of history, as builders deal with granite blocks. Embracing things dispersed and widely variant, as also things mutually inclined towards fellowship, he defines and demonstrates, as a master artisan, how they may all be grasped and overcome and harmonized in a commanding unison. With a skilled designer's easy grace he drafts a sketch of our transformed career, as plain and open to the observing eye as are the massive, graceful movements of deploying clouds across the sky. Here is majesty, lofty, balanced, and secure. And all its excellence is ethical. And it pleads to be made supreme in earthly politics. In such a message is ideal courtliness. Its bearer must be a comely prince. The man and author upon whose polished tongue those sentiments found birth must be of royal lineage. Thus Lincoln has given to civics ideal comeliness and dignity. In his hand, and under his design, politics wears heavenly majesty. In his conception of a State, though devised and traced in times when cruelty and sordidness and unfairness and negligence of God were sadly prevalent through the Nation's life, there rose to view, in his pure patriotism, a civic standard in which, through holy fear of God, all men were rated at their immortal worth, and treated with the love and fairness that were the mutual due of freemen who were peers. Here is a portrait of a patriot upon which no artist can easily improve--a portrait which attests in Lincoln's soul a pure and a free idea of what true art must ever be. And it is not without profound significance for art that Lincoln's statesmanship has become one of the finest objects in our modern world for artists to idealize. The very features of his face, that were wont to be esteemed most plain, have come to show a symmetry that is beautiful. And his whole outward frame, that men so many times have called ungainly, has come to bear and body forth a dignity such as summons finest bronze and marble to their most exalted ministry. Whence came to that plain face and plainer frame such symmetry and dignity? Let artists contemplate and reply. For in Lincoln's manhood stature, where utmost rudeness has become transmuted to refinement, all men are taught that true beauty and true art are ethical. In moral harmony is found ideal symmetry. HIS COMPOSURE--THE PROBLEM OF PESSIMISM