[1] Charles Sumner said, in one of his great speeches in Fanueil Hall, Boston, that if the speech Lincoln carefully wrote had not been circulated, or if he had actually delivered the speech which he wrote, the change of direction in the car of progress would have led to delays and disasters "out beyond the limits of human calculation." Many of the great historians like Hay, Brockett, McClure, and Miss Tarbell have overlooked or thrown aside the most wonderful portion of that speech where the disgusted orator lost his place because of a misplaced leaf of the manuscript from which he was reading. Wave after wave of telling eloquence rolled forth from this uncouth, gaunt figure and literally dashed itself against the hard, resisting minds of that prejudiced audience. Already the feeble wits were engulfed in the overwhelming verbal torrents that came now like avalanches, and little by little even the most biased minds began to relent under the mystic persuasiveness of his voice and the unanswerableness of his logic, until nearly everybody in that throbbing and excited audience was convinced that slavery was one of the blackest crimes of which man could be found guilty. And even before the last words of his impassioned eloquence had passed his lips the audience was on its feet, and those most bitterly opposed to him politically arose too and applauded him. Naturally, no verbatim report of that address can be recalled after sixty years. But the impression it made almost surpasses belief when told to those who were not there. There is no clearer descriptive term which could be applied to the speaker than to state, as some did, that "the orator was transfigured." No one thought of his ill-fitting new suit, of his old hat, of his protruding wrists or the disheveled hair, of his long legs, his bony face, or the one-sided necktie. The natural Abraham Lincoln had disappeared and an angel spake in his place. Nothing but language which seems extravagant will tell the accurate truth.