I have long since made up my mind that the most extraordinary events transpire from a condition of repose, else we would never be startled. The first earthquake is the terror; the residue are but affairs of mercantile and architectural speculation. Whatever is striking is struck quick. The practice of the prize ring is the theory of wonders. The shoulder of a man propels a complex system of muscles, and a man in front has his countenance smashed. The suddenness of the experiment accounts for the surprise at its result. Preparations for great deeds are not always apparent. A coup d’etat is such because it is a coup. The killing of Mr. Lincoln was more astounding as a positive deed than the beheading of Charles the First, or the razoring of Louis the Sixteenth and his Queen, daughter of the Cæsars. In the case of the President, silence and mystery kept pace with the public confidence in his personal safety; in the case of Charles and Louis, the politics of a people had long been disturbed and outraged with regard to the traditional sanctity of kings, and there was preparation almost evidently looking to the final result, and the prelude, from the very nature of those governments, admitted of hardly any other epilogue; but with Mr. Lincoln it was different. He sat in his box at the theatre, secure, in a war brought to a result suitable to his designs, with pleasant painted scenery before him, a comedy of brimming humor in course of acting, altogether in the very last place he or any one expected that the blow upon his life would fall; but it fell, and the world was astonished. Thus,—with the meadow and its brook before me, with the grand belt of woods bowing over the fence, with the soft air of summer in the boughs, with the mowers in the grass, with the sunlight blinking through flower-stems and vegetables of homely nomenclature, but admirable qualities,—I sat in the porch of my summer dwelling; and while I sat there, musing and idling, a deed was done, so wicked, so ruthless, so hideously unessential, that even now, after the lapse of so long a time, I feel the need of a new word,—a word with the thunder and the lightning in it, with the curse of man and the anathema of God in it, to express the sensation it produced.