One summer's day, when ploughing in the fields of that land of Lincoln, I heard a sound of buzzing in the air and, looking up, I saw a faint cloud against the clear sky. I recognized it as a swarm of bees making their way from a hive, they knew not where, and with an instinct born of the plains at once I began to follow them and to throw up clods of earth to stop their flight, bringing them down finally on the edge of the field upon a branch of a tree, where they were at evening gathered into a new hive and persuaded back to profitable industry instead of wasting their substance in the forest. So this great ploughman used the clods of earth, the things at his hand, illustrations from the fields, to bring the thoughts of his countrymen down to contentful co-operation again. "You may," said Alcibiades, speaking of Socrates, "imagine Brasidas and others to have been like Achilles, or you may imagine Nestor and Antenor to have been like Pericles; and the same may be said of other famous men. But of this strange being you will never be able to find any likeness, however remote, either among men that now are or who ever have been--other than ... Silenus and the Satyrs, and they represent in a figure not only himself but his words. For his words are like the images of Silenus which open. They are ridiculous when you first hear them.... His talk is of pack-beasts and smiths and cobblers and curriers.... But he who opens the bust and sees what is within will find they are the only words which have a meaning in them and also the most divine, abounding in fair images of virtue, and of the widest comprehension, or rather extending to the whole duty of a good and honorable man." [Footnote: Plato, "Symposium," Jowett's trans., 1:592.] The twenty-three centuries since Socrates do not furnish me with a fitter characterization of Lincoln. His image was as homely as that of Silenus was bestial. His talk was of ploughs and boats, polecats and whiskey. But those who opened this homely image found in him a likeness as of no other man, and in his words a meaning that was of widest and most ennobling comprehension. And, as Crito said for all ages, after the sun that was on the hilltops when Socrates took the poison had set and darkness had come: "Of all the men of his time, he was the wisest and justest and best." So has the poet of that western democracy given to all time this phrase, sung in the evening of the day of Lincoln's martyrdom, at the time when the lilac bloomed and the great star early dropped in the western sky and the thrush sang solitary: "The sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands." [Footnote: Walt Whitman, "When Lilacs Last."]