“The appearance of the President, as I read aloud these fateful words was piteous. Never, as long as I knew him, did he seem to be so broken up, so dispirited, and so ghostlike. Clasping his hands behind his back, he walked up and down the room saying, ‘My God! My God! What will the country say? What will the country say?’” Not that Lincoln feared criticism or even denunciation. He does not know the greatest and noblest American who thinks that. No, it was the torturing, intolerable thought that it might be his dreadful fate to be the last President of the United States, the haunting idea which, a generation later, was written by the loyal, iron-souled Grant on his deathbed: “Anything that could have prolonged the war a year beyond the time that it did finally close would probably have exhausted the North to such an extent that they might then have abandoned the contest and agreed to a separation.” The shedding of blood grieved Lincoln. Even when Grant won Vicksburg, and Lee’s gallant army was defeated in the three days’ battle at Gettysburg, his joy was overcast by the thought of the dead and dying on both sides. All through the bloodiest days of the war he went to the hospitals in Washington. His heart was with the common soldiers. And he was tender to the Confederate wounded. He never could forget that they were his countrymen. Nor could he withstand an appeal to pardon a young soldier sentenced to death. Again and again he left his bed, after a day and evening of exhausting toil, to save the life of some distant wretched youth condemned to die at daybreak. Is there anything in the whole range of English literature more solemnly beautiful and heart-moving than the note he wrote to the widow Bixby, of Boston? “DEAR MADAM: I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously in the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. Yours very sincerely and respectfully, A. LINCOLN.” But in his determination to save the Republic no horror could shake his resolution. It is no small part of his title to the love of the nation to-day that one so merciful and tender-hearted could suffer the frightful shocks of years of slaughter and waste without wavering from his duty.