shaft having figures of War, History, Peace and Plenty. This charming spot was the centre of the Union line, then a rough, rocky hill. The cemetery was dedicated in November, 1863, Edward Everett delivering the oration, and the monument on July 1, 1869. At the cemetery dedication President Lincoln made the famous "twenty-line address" which is regarded as the most immortal utterance of the martyr President, and has become an American classic. The British _Westminster Review_ described it as an oration having but one equal, in that pronounced upon those who fell during the first year of the Peloponnesian War, and as being its superior, because "natural, fuller of feeling, more touching and pathetic, and we know with an absolute certainty that it was really delivered." The President was requested to say a few words by way of dedication, and drawing from his pocket a crumpled piece of paper on which he had written some notes, he spoke as follows: "Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new Nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting-place of those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. 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 that they have thus far so nobly carried on. 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 here gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain--that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."