a trained and consummate speaker.  When he had finished, and the applause that greeted him had died away, the multitude called vociferously for an address from Lincoln.  With an unconscious air, the President came forward at the call, put his spectacles on his nose, and read, in a quiet voice which gradually warmed with feeling, while his careworn face became radiant with the light of genuine emotion, the following brief address: 

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.  Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.  We are met on a great battle-field of that war.  We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place of those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.  It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.  But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground.  The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.  The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.  It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly carried on.  It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The simple and sublime words of this short address shook the hearts of the listeners, and before the first sentence was ended they were under the spell of a mighty magician.  They stood hushed, awed, and melted, as the speaker enforced the solemn lesson of the hour, and brought home to them, in plain unvarnished terms, the duty which remained for them to do—­to finish the work which the dead around them had given their lives to carry on.  It was one of the briefest of the many speeches with which Lincoln had swayed the impulses and opinions of crowds of his fellow-men, but it is the one which will be remembered above all others as hallowed by the truest and loftiest inspiration.  As the final sentence ended, amid the tears and sobs and cheers of the excited throng, the President turned to Mr. Everett, and, grasping his hand, exclaimed with sincerity, “I congratulate you on your success.”  Mr. Everett responded in the fervor of his emotion, “Ah, Mr. President, how gladly would I exchange all my hundred pages to have been the author of your twenty lines!”