The fourth of March drew near. Mr. Lincoln, in tender, pathetic speech, bade adieu to his neighbors at Springfield and hastened on to Washington. As he journeyed towards the national capital the loyal of St. Louis followed him with almost breathless interest. They pored over his short speeches to the crowds that gathered to greet him at railway stations. They were thrilled with his brave and patriotic utterances at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. In the malicious plot laid at Baltimore, they heard once more the rumbling of the approaching conflict; and when, in his great inaugural address, he said, “In _your_ hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not _in mine_, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail _you_. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors. _You_ have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while _I_ shall have the most solemn one ‘to preserve, protect, and defend’ it;” we knew that, if neither the Federal government nor the secessionists yielded, the civil war of which the President spoke would inevitably burst upon us. But the rumblings of the bloody conflict were not heard alone in the black war-clouds that hung threateningly over the Gulf States and the national capital, but at last directly over the streets along which we daily walked. Succeeding the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln there was a period of silence more painful than actual battle. To us who were straining our eyes toward Washington, to see what the President, of whom we expected so much, was doing; who, intent, were listening that we might hear from his lips words of cheer and wisdom, he seemed to be paralyzed. We saw nothing. We heard nothing. Perhaps he was vainly hoping that those already in rebellion against the general government would yield to his eloquent appeal at the close of his famous inaugural. “I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” But he could not, by any appeal however reasonable and urgent, persuade men in the Cotton States. It was too late. He could not extinguish a conflagration by pouring oil upon it. Perhaps, however, he himself had no hope of peace, but was noiselessly preparing for the inevitable conflict. But whatever was the cause of these days of silence, they were days of sorest trial to the loyal of our city.