expression, "Better not swap horses in the middle of the stream,"
that gave him his second election. This vision power gave him that
sentence equal to anything in Shakespeare, when Vicksburg fell, "Once
more the Father of Waters goes unvexed to the sea." This faculty enabled
him to sweep into one illustration a thousand arguments, so that the
people could never forget the mother principle that explained the facts.

Nor may we forget what the great cause did for him. The era of the war
was a great era, because God heaved society as the winds heave the
waves, and men were swept forward with irresistible power upon the great
movement of liberty. Great movements make great epochs and great men. A
great ideal of God and righteousness and liberty lifts Savonarola and
Florence to new levels; a great cathedral inspires Michael Angelo's
great dome; a Divine Saviour and His transfiguration exalt Raphael;
Paradise explains Dante; listening to the sevenfold Hallelujah chorus of
God arouses the sweep and majesty of Milton's epic; the woes of three
million slaves made eloquence possible for Phillips and Beecher. The
saving of a Union, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition
that all men were created equal, represented a cause into which Lincoln
could fling himself. The thought of meanly losing or nobly saving the
last, best hope of earth, exalted, transformed, and armed the men,
making feeblings strong, and strong men to be giants.

Eloquence and heroism wane during the commercial era. No man can be
eloquent upon the duty on hides, or salt, or the digging of mud out of a
river. But dumb lips will break into glorious speech at the thought of
freeing millions of slaves, and saving free institutions, and handing
liberty forward to other lands, and to generations yet unborn. The era
of Fort Sumter and Gettysburg, when liberty and slavery were in their
death grapple, was an era so great that the ordinary issues of avarice,
self-interest, fame, luxury, became contemptible, and men were exalted
to the point where they spake, and suffered, and marched, and died, more
like gods than men. The great battles to be fought, the great armies to
be moved, the great navies to be directed, the great orators and editors
with whom he counselled, the many slaves for whom he became a voice, the
great days on which he felt that he was making history, the great future
into which he hoped to send the great liberties unimpaired and purified,
the