It took place in the Second Presbyterian church at Springfield, and lasted eight nights, each speaker occupying a night in turn.  Mr. Speed speaks thus of Lincoln’s effort:  “Lincoln delivered his speech without manuscript or notes.  He had a wonderful faculty in that way.  He might be writing an important document, be interrupted in the midst of a sentence, turn his attention to other matters entirely foreign to the subject on which he was engaged, and then take up his pen and begin where he left off without reading the previous part of the sentence.  He could grasp, exhaust, and quit any subject with more facility than any man I have ever seen or heard of.”  The subjoined paragraphs from the speech above referred to show the impassioned feeling which Lincoln poured forth that night.  Those familiar with his admirable style in his later years would scarcely recognize him in these florid and rather over-weighted periods: 

Many free countries have lost their liberty, and ours may lose hers; but if she shall, be it my proudest plume, not that I was the last to desert, but that I never deserted her.  I know that the great volcano at Washington, aroused and directed by the evil spirit that reigns there, is belching forth the lava of political corruption in a current broad and deep, which is sweeping with frightful velocity over the whole length and breadth of the land, bidding fair to leave unscathed no green spot or living thing; while on its bosom are riding, like demons on the waves of hell, the imps of the Evil Spirit, and fiendishly torturing and taunting all those who dare resist its destroying course with the hopelessness of their effort; and knowing this, I cannot deny that all may be swept away.  Broken by it, I too may be; bow to it, I never will.  The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause which we deem to be just.  It shall not deter me.  If I ever feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country deserted by all the world beside, and I, standing up boldly and alone, hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors.  And here, without contemplating consequences, before high Heaven and in the face of the whole world, I swear eternal fidelity to the just cause, as I deem it, of the land of my life, my liberty, and my love.  And who that thinks with me will not fearlessly adopt the oath I take?  Let none falter who thinks he is right, and we may succeed.  But if, after all, we shall fail, be it so.  We shall have the proud consolation of saying to our conscience and to the departed shade of our country’s freedom, that the cause approved by our judgments and adored by our hearts in disaster, in chains, in torture, and in death, we never failed in defending.

In this canvass Lincoln came again into collision with Douglas, the adversary whom he had met two years