expression for five ideas to
be expressed in one way. Edward Everett, once President of Harvard
University, could talk in five languages, and at Gettysburg spoke for
two hours. Lincoln could speak in one language, and did so for two
minutes. But the next morning Mr. Everett wrote to the President: "I
should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the
central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes."
Lincoln's one language shames our knowledge of four languages, his three
books shame our libraries, and our four years of college culture.

Nor must we overlook the influence upon Lincoln's style of the parables
of Jesus and the fables of AEsop. There are two invariable signs of
genius in a boy,--one is the serious note, and the other is the
picture-making note. All the great things represent serious thinking.
The greatest artist of the last century was the most serious one,--Watt,
with his Love and Life, and Love and Death, and Mammon, and Hope. The
great poems have been the serious poems, the In Memoriam, and the
Intimations of Immortality, the Hamlet and the Lear. The great orators
have been the serious orators.

The next sign of genius is the picture-making faculty. Men of talent
evolve arguments, men of genius create emblems, parables and pictures.
Minds oftentimes called profound use long abstractions, and are called
deep thinkers, because nobody can understand them. But along comes a man
of genius, and he squeezes the juice out of the abstract argument, and
flings the rind away, and tells you what it is like.

Measured in terms of genius, the parables of Jesus are the greatest
literary achievements in history. AEsop's fables teach by pictures.
"Pilgrim's Progress" is pictorial.

Lincoln was exceedingly fortunate in his generation in that the three
great books of pictures were in his hands during the imaginative epoch.
Of course he was born with the talent for parable, because genius is
one-half nature and the other half nurture. It was this natural gift and
the training that taught him how when he had completed an argument and
mastered the principle, to say, Now what is this great principle like,
and how can I condense it into a picture and put it in a happy phrase
that will sing itself across the land? This picture-making gift inspired
him to quote the keen wisdom of that expression of Jesus, "The house
divided against itself cannot stand." This skill in parables gave him
the