a collection of his stories and sketches reprinted from the magazines.  His novels, though in parts crude and immature, have a dash and buoyancy—­an out-door air about them—­which give the reader a winning impression of Winthrop’s personality.  The best of them is, perhaps, Cecil Dreeme, a romance that reminds one a little of Hawthorne, and the scene of which is the New York University building on Washington Square, a locality that has been further celebrated in Henry James’s novel of Washington Square.

Another member of this same Seventh Regiment, Fitz James O’Brien, an Irishman by birth, who died at Baltimore in 1862 from the effects of a wound received in a cavalry skirmish, had contributed to the magazines a number of poems and of brilliant though fantastic tales, among which the Diamond Lens and What Was It? had something of Edgar A. Poe’s quality.  Another Irish-American, Charles G. Halpine, under the pen-name of “Miles O’Reilly,” wrote a good many clever ballads of the war, partly serious and partly in comic brogue.  Prose writers of note furnished the magazines with narratives of their experience at the seat of war, among papers of which kind may be mentioned Dr. Holmes’s My Search for the Captain, in the Atlantic Monthly, and Colonel T. W. Higginson’s Army Life in a Black Regiment, collected into a volume in 1870.

Of the public oratory of the war, the foremost example is the ever-memorable address of Abraham Lincoln at the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg.  The war had brought the nation to its intellectual majority.  In the stress of that terrible fight there was no room for buncombe and verbiage, such as the newspapers and stump-speakers used to dole out in ante bellum days.  Lincoln’s speech is short—­a few grave words which he turned aside for a moment to speak in the midst of his task of saving the country.  The speech is simple, naked of figures, every sentence impressed with a sense of responsibility for the work yet to be done and with a stern determination to do it.  “In a larger sense,” it says, “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 advanced.  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.”  Here was eloquence of a different sort from the sonorous perorations of Webster or the polished climaxes of Everett.  As we read the plain, strong language of this brief classic, with its solemnity, its restraint, its “brave old wisdom of sincerity,” we seem to see the president’s homely features irradiated with the light of coming martyrdom—­