Guns of the Gettysburg heights, we hear you as out of the distance: Shall we not understand? Ye spake, in your awful contending, Words ye spake through the cloud, with austere oracular voices, Mighty reverberant watchwords of Titan-forces in conflict: Crying, “The sundered stars!” and replying “The heavens in their clusters, Led in the lines of law, and linked in their differing glory Star unto star to the end, until God folds them up as a vesture!” Crying, “Fit rule of the Few, and a serfdom meet for the Many!” Thundering out of the smoke, as the Voice on the summit of Sinai,-- Then on the great Third Day, when the trumpet was loud, and the lightnings Leaped in the mount, and the people fell down at the Voice of Jehovah,-- Thundering out of the smoke with the final august proclamation: “Nay! but the larger Hope, and the limitless future of Manhood!” (Nathless a nation elect, a people led forth out of bondage, Led of the cloud and led of the fire, and upheld in the battle, Borne upon wings of eagles, and saved in the midst of the waters, Made to them gods of gold, even there, in the desert of Sinai.) Guns of the Gettysburg heights, we hear you as out of the distance: Cease not to roll, vast Echoes! Reverberate solemn, immortal! Speak to us out of the past of the splendor of valor triumphant, Speak of the splendor of valor transcending defeat, of the manhood Tried to the utmost, and true to some lofty and ultimate brightness Secretly set above self: O speak, that we too in our measure,-- Fallen on diverse days, far otherwise tempted and tested,-- Work the Eternal Will, in the chaos a force of salvation, Motes of the dust as it streams, yet touched with the light of God’s purpose! ABRAHAM LINCOLN _February 12, 1909_ I The centuries pass, yea as a dream they pass. Nations and races, with all that they have sown, Sink as the prairie-grass, By the invisible scythe silently mown. The wind breathes over them, and the place thereof Knows them no more. But the unsounded sky still broods above, Blue ocean without shore, Eternal in its breadth and depth and fire of love. So the o’erbrooding Soul, purely ablaze, Full-flooded with the light of God, Outlasts Man’s body and all his works and ways, Outlasts this little earth whereon he trod. II