This is one of the historic fields of the world, and to us Americans no other has an interest so profound. Marathon and Arbela, Worcester and Valmy, even our own Bunker Hill and Saratoga and Yorktown, fields of undying fame, have not for us a significance so vital and so beneficent as this field of Gettysburg. Around its chief and central interest gather associations of felicitous significance. Like the House of Delegates in Williamsburg, where Patrick Henry roused Virginia to resistance; like Faneuil Hall in Boston, where Samuel Adams lifted New England to independence; like Carpenter's Hall in Philadelphia, where the Continental Congress assembled, this field is invested with the undying charm of famous words fitly spoken. While yet the echoes of the battle might have seemed to linger in the awed and grieving air, stood the sad and patient and devoted man, whose burden was greater than that of any man of his generation, and as greatly borne as any solemn responsibility in human history. Upon this field he spoke the few simple words which enshrine the significance of the great controversy and which have become a part of this historic scene, to endure with the memory of Gettysburg, and to touch the heart and exalt the hope of every American from the gulf to the lakes and from ocean to ocean, so long as this valley shall smile with spring and glow with autumn, and day and night and seed time and harvest shall not fail. To-day his prophetic vision is fulfilled. The murmur of these hosts of peace encamped upon this field of war, this universal voice of friendly greeting and congratulation, these cheers of the gray echoing the cheers of the blue, what are they but the answering music of those chords of memory; the swelling chorus of the Union responding to the better angels of our nature? If there be joy in Heaven this day, it is in the heart of Abraham Lincoln as he looks down upon this field of Gettysburg. But that the glory of this day, and of America, and of human nature, may be full, it is the veterans and survivors of the armies whose tremendous conflict interpreted the Constitution, who to-day, here upon the field of battle and upon its twenty-fifth anniversary, clasp friendly hands of sympathy to salute a common victory. This is a spectacle without precedent in history. No field of the cloth of gold, or of the grounded arms, no splendid scene of the royal adjustment of conquests, the diplomatic settlement of treaties, or the papal incitement of crusades, rivals in moral grandeur and significance this simple pageant.