In one hour joy lay without a pulse, without a gleam or breath.  A sorrow came that swept through the land as huge storms sweep through the forest and field, rolling thunder along the sky, disheveling the flowers, daunting every singer in thicket or forest, and pouring blackness and darkness across the land and up the mountains.  Did ever so many hearts, in so brief a time, touch two such boundless feelings?  It was the uttermost of joy; it was the uttermost of sorrow—­noon and midnight, without a space between.

The blow brought not a sharp pang.  It was so terrible that at first it stunned sensibility.  Citizens were like men awakened at midnight by an earthquake and bewildered to find everything that they were accustomed to trust wavering and falling.  The very earth was no longer solid.  The first feeling was the least.  Men waited to get straight to feel.  They wandered in the streets as if groping after some impending dread, or undeveloped sorrow, or some one to tell them what ailed them.  They met each other as if each would ask the other, “Am I awake, or do I dream?” There was a piteous helplessness.  Strong men bowed down and wept.  Other and common griefs belonged to some one in chief; this belonged to all.  It was each and every man’s.  Every virtuous household in the land felt as if its firstborn were gone.  Men were bereaved and walked for days as if a corpse lay unburied in their dwellings.  There was nothing else to think of.  They could speak of nothing but that; and yet of that they could speak only falteringly.  All business was laid aside.  Pleasure forgot to smile.  The city for nearly a week ceased to roar.  The great Leviathan lay down, and was still.  Even avarice stood still, and greed was strangely moved to generous sympathy and universal sorrow.  Rear to his name monuments, found charitable institutions, and write his name above their lintels; but no monument will ever equal the universal, spontaneous, and sublime sorrow that in a moment swept down lines and parties, and covered up animosities, and in an hour brought a divided people into unity of grief and indivisible fellowship of anguish. ...

This nation has dissolved—­but in tears only.  It stands foursquare, more solid to-day than any pyramid in Egypt.  This people are neither wasted, nor daunted, nor disordered.  Men hate slavery and love liberty with stronger hate and love to-day than ever before.  The government is not weakened, it is made stronger.  How naturally and easily were the ranks closed!  Another steps forward, in the hour that the one fell, to take his place and his mantle; and I avow my belief that he will be found a man true to every instinct of liberty; true to the whole trust that is reposed in him; vigilant of the Constitution; careful of the laws; wise for liberty, in that he himself, through his life, has known what it was to suffer from the stings of slavery, and to prize liberty from bitter personal experiences.