Eloquence and heroism wane during the commercial era. No man can be eloquent upon the duty on hides, or salt, or the digging of mud out of a river. But dumb lips will break into glorious speech at the thought of freeing millions of slaves, and saving free institutions, and handing liberty forward to other lands, and to generations yet unborn. The era of Fort Sumter and Gettysburg, when liberty and slavery were in their death grapple, was an era so great that the ordinary issues of avarice, self-interest, fame, luxury, became contemptible, and men were exalted to the point where they spake, and suffered, and marched, and died, more like gods than men. The great battles to be fought, the great armies to be moved, the great navies to be directed, the great orators and editors with whom he counselled, the many slaves for whom he became a voice, the great days on which he felt that he was making history, the great future into which he hoped to send the great liberties unimpaired and purified, the great God over all,--lent greatness to Abraham Lincoln, clothed him with pathos, with sorrow, with dignity and majesty, as with garments. Like every giant, he was gentle. The truly great are always sensitive and sympathetic. In proportion as the mountain goes upward in size does it gain in power to return the strong man's shout, or the sigh of the lost child, echoing and reechoing the cry of need. Sympathy is the soul journeying abroad, to bind up the wounds of him who has fallen among thieves. Sympathy cannot feast in a palace while the poor famish. Selfishness can stop its ears with wax lest it hear the groan of the poor, but sympathy is knitted in with its kind. Lincoln worked as hard to help men as slave masters did to recover a fugitive to bondage. It has been beautifully said that he did kind deeds stealthily, as if he were afraid of being found out. He became a shield above the fallen; he stood between the soldier, condemned for the sleep of exhaustion, and the hangman's noose. He refused to attend a cabinet meeting because he was trying to find a reason for reprieving a soldier. "It is butchery day," he said one Friday morning, and he denied himself to a committee because he did not think that hanging would help the boy who was condemned to die. "They said he was homely," said a poor woman, going away from the White House with a reprieve for her son; "he is the handsomest man I ever saw." It is this sympathy that runs through his letter to that mother, whose five sons had died gloriously on the field of battle. For he squeezed the purple clusters of the heart, and let the crimson tide flow down upon the page, as he prayed that the mother might carry through the years "only the cherished memory of the loved and the lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom."