the marble, as the artist
must dream the picture to come from the brilliant unmeaning of his
palette, as the musician dreams a song, so he who writes must have a
vision of his finished work before he touches, to begin it, a
medium more elastic, more vivid, more powerful than any
other--words--prismatic bits of humanity, old as the Pharaohs, new as
the Arabs of the street, broken, sparkling, alive, from the age-long
life of the race. Abraham Lincoln, with the clear thought in his mind
of what he would say, found the sentences that came to him colorless,
wooden. A wonder flashed over him once or twice of Everett's skill
with these symbols which, it seemed to him, were to the Bostonian a
key-board facile to make music, to Lincoln tools to do his labor. He
put the idea aside, for it hindered him. As he found the sword fitted
to his hand he must fight with it; it might be that he, as well as
Everett, could say that which should go straight from him to his
people, to the nation who struggled at his back towards a goal. At
least each syllable he said should be chiselled from the rock of his
sincerity. So he cut here and there an adjective, here and there a
phrase, baring the heart of his thought, leaving no ribbon or flower
of rhetoric to flutter in the eyes of those with whom he would be
utterly honest. And when he had done he read the speech and dropped
it from his hand to the floor and stared again from the window. It was
the best he could do, and it was a failure. So, with the pang of the
workman who believes his work done wrong, he lifted and folded the
torn bit of paper and put it in his pocket, and put aside the thought
of it, as of a bad thing which he might not better, and turned and
talked cheerfully with his friends.

At eleven o'clock on the morning of the day following, on November 19,
1863, a vast, silent multitude billowed, like waves of the sea, over
what had been not long before the battle-field of Gettysburg. There
were wounded soldiers there who had beaten their way four months
before through a singing fire across these quiet fields, who had
seen the men die who were buried here; there were troops, grave and
responsible, who must soon go again into battle; there were the rank
and file of an everyday American gathering in surging thousands; and
above them all, on the open-air platform, there were the leaders of
the land, the pilots who to-day lifted a hand from the wheel of the
ship of state to salute the m