histories," and concludes with this striking peroration:-- "But those histories are gone. They _can_ be read no more forever. They _were_ a fortress of strength; but what invading foeman could never do, the silent artillery of time _has done_,--the levelling of its walls. They are gone. They _were_ a forest of giant oaks; but the all-resistless hurricane has swept over them, and left only here and there a lonely trunk, despoiled of its verdure, shorn of its foliage, unshading and unshaded, to murmur in a few more gentle breezes, and to combat with its mutilated limbs a few more rude storms, then to sink and be no more. They _were_ the pillars of the temple of liberty; and now that they have crumbled away, that temple must fall, unless we, the descendants, supply their places with other pillars hewn from the same solid quarry of sober reason. Passion has helped us, but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason--cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason--must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence. Let those materials be moulded into _general intelligence, sound morality_, and, in particular, _a reverence for the Constitution and the laws_; and that we improved to the last, that we revered his name to the last, that during his long sleep we permitted no hostile foot to pass or desecrate his resting-place, shall be that which to learn the last trump shall awaken our Washington. Upon these let the proud fabric of freedom rest as the rock of its basis, and as truly as has been said of the only greater institution, 'The gates of hell shall not prevail against it."' 1 The italics are the orator's. These extracts from a lecture carefully composed by Mr. Lincoln at the mature age of twenty-eight, and after considerable experience in the public service, are worthy of attentive perusal. To those familiar with his sober and pure style at a later age, these sophomoric passages will seem incredible. But they were thought "able and eloquent" by the "Young Men's Lyceum" of Springfield: he was "solicited to furnish a copy for publication," and they were duly printed in "The Sangamon Journal." In the mere matter of rhetoric, they compare favorably with some of his other productions of nearly the same date. This was what he would have called his "growing time;" and it is intensely interesting to witness the processes of such mental growth as his. In time, gradually, but still rapidly, his style changes completely: the constrained and unnatural attempts at striking and lofty metaphor disappear, and the qualities which produced the Gettysburg address--that model of unadorned eloquence--begin to be felt. He finds the people understand him better when he comes down from his stilts, and talks to them from their own level.