ssiveness of the appeal comes not
from fervid vehemence of language, but from the sincerity of his own
convictions. Sometimes one can see that through its whole course the
argument is suffused by the speaker's feeling, and when the time comes
for the feeling to be directly expressed, it glows not with fitful
flashes, but with the steady heat of an intense and strenuous soul.

The impression which most of the speeches leave on the reader is that
their matter has been carefully thought over even when the words have
not been learnt by heart. But there is an anecdote that on one occasion,
early in his career, Lincoln went to a public meeting not in the least
intending to speak, but presently being called for by the audience, rose
in obedience to the call, and delivered a long address so ardent and
thrilling that the reporters dropped their pencils and, absorbed in
watching him, forgot to take down what he said. It has also been stated,
on good authority, that on his way in the railroad cars, to the
dedication of the monument on the field of Gettysburg, he turned to a
Pennsylvanian gentleman who was sitting beside him and remarked, "I
suppose I shall be expected to say something this afternoon; lend me a
pencil and a bit of paper," and that he thereupon jotted down the notes
of a speech which has become the best known and best remembered of all
his utterances, so that some of its words and sentences have passed into
the minds of all educated men everywhere.

That famous Gettysburg speech is the best example one could desire of
the characteristic quality of Lincoln's eloquence. It is a short speech.
It is wonderfully terse in expression. It is quiet, so quiet that at the
moment it did not make upon the audience, an audience wrought up by a
long and highly-decorated harangue from one of the prominent orators of
the day, an impression at all commensurate to that which it began to
make as soon as it was read over America and Europe. There is in it not
a touch of what we call rhetoric, or of any striving after effect. Alike
in thought and in language it is simple, plain, direct. But it states
certain truths and principles in phrases so aptly chosen and so
forcible, that one feels as if those truths could have been conveyed in
no other words, and as if this deliverance of them were made for all
time. Words so simple and so strong could have come only from one who
had meditated so long upon the primal facts of American history and