satisfied with treating her in that way, I am not. It is true that you are
to have that forty for two hundred dollars, at Mother's death, but you are
not to have it before. I am confident that land can be made to produce for
Mother at least $30 a year, and I can not, to oblige any living person,
consent that she shall be put on an allowance of sixteen dollars a year.

Yours, etc.,

A. LINCOLN.

1852

EULOGY ON HENRY CLAY,

DELIVERED IN THE STATE HOUSE AT SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS, JULY 16, 1852.

On the fourth day of July, 1776, the people of a few feeble and oppressed
colonies of Great Britain, inhabiting a portion of the Atlantic coast of
North America, publicly declared their national independence, and made
their appeal to the justice of their cause and to the God of battles for
the maintenance of that declaration. That people were few in number and
without resources, save only their wise heads and stout hearts. Within the
first year of that declared independence, and while its maintenance was
yet problematical, while the bloody struggle between those resolute rebels
and their haughty would-be masters was still waging,--of undistinguished
parents and in an obscure district of one of those colonies Henry Clay
was born. The infant nation and the infant child began the race of life
together. For three quarters of a century they have travelled hand in
hand. They have been companions ever. The nation has passed its perils,
and it is free, prosperous, and powerful. The child has reached his
manhood, his middle age, his old age, and is dead. In all that has
concerned the nation the man ever sympathized; and now the nation mourns
the man.

The day after his death one of the public journals, opposed to him
politically, held the following pathetic and beautiful language, which I
adopt partly because such high and exclusive eulogy, originating with a
political friend, might offend good taste, but chiefly because I could not
in any language of my own so well express my thoughts:

"Alas, who can realize that Henry Clay is dead! Who can realize that never
again that majestic form shall rise in the council-chambers of his country
to beat back the storms of anarchy which may threaten, or pour the oil of
peace upon the troubled billows as they rage and menace around! Who
can realize that the workings of that mighty mind have ceased, that the
throbbings of that gallant heart are stilled, that the mighty sweep of
that