“There is a deep excavation in the rock shown to visitors, among the White Mountains, into which one of the purest of the mountain streams pours itself, known as ‘The Pool.’ As you stand by its side at an ordinary time you look down upon a mass of impenetrable green, lying like a rich emerald in a setting of granite upon the bosom of the mountain. But occasionally the noon-day sun darts through it a vertical ray which penetrates to its very bottom, and shows every configuration of the varied interior. I felt at that moment that a ray had darted down to the bottom of Abraham Lincoln’s heart, and that I could see the whole. It seemed to me as beautiful as that emerald pool, and as pure. I have never forgotten that glimpse. When the strange revocation came of the most rational and reasonable proclamation of Fremont,--‘The slaves of Rebels shall be set free,’--I remembered that hearty ‘_Amen_,’ and stifled my rising apprehensions. I remembered it in those dark days when McClellan, Nero-like, was fiddling on James River, and Pope was being routed before Washington, and the report came that a prominent Cabinet Minister had boasted that he had succeeded in preventing the issue of the Emancipation Proclamation; I said: ‘Abraham Lincoln will prove true yet.’ _And he has!_ God bless him! _he has_. Slow, if you please, but _true_. Unimpassioned, if you please, but _true_. Jocose, trifling, if you please, but _true_. Reluctant to part with unworthy official advisers, but _true_ himself--_true as steel_! I could wish him less a man of facts, and more a man of ideas. I could wish him more stern and more vigorous: but every man has his faults, and still I say: _Amen to Abraham Lincoln!_”[22] LXXVIII.