r of witty expression to a degree excelling that of the
writers he admired, and in quality of product, if not in quantity (for
the greater part of the "funny stories" attributed to him, thank
heaven, are apocryphal) he stands in the front rank of the American
humorists of his generation.

And as the poet and the wit are near akin through this common appeal
to the imagination, Lincoln, had he overcome the obsession of
melancholy in his nature which was the mood in which he resorted to
poetry, and which early limited his taste for it to verse of a sad and
reflective kind, might have become a literary craftsman of the order
of Holmes, whose poetry in the main was bright and joyous, and, even
when he occasionally touched upon such subjects as death, was, as we
have seen, informed with inspiring Hellenic beauty rather than
depressing Hebraic moralization. It was in his sad moments, says Henry
C. Whitney, that the mind of Lincoln "gravitated toward the weird,
sombre and mystical. In his normal and tranquil state of mind, 'The
Last Leaf,' by Oliver Wendell Holmes, was his favorite" (poem). It was
Lincoln's happy lot to rise in the realm of oratory by the power of
his poetic spirit higher than any American, save probably Emerson, has
done in other fields of literature. On the theme of slavery, where his
unerring moral sense had free sway, he became our supreme orator,
transcending even Webster in grandeur of thought and beauty of its
expression. His periods are not as sonorous as the Olympian New
England orator's, but their accents will reach as far and resound even
longer by the carrying and sustaining power of the ideas which they
express. Indeed, it is on the wings supplied by Lincoln that Webster's
most significant conception, that of the nature of the Constitution,
is even now borne along, because of the uplifting ideality which
Lincoln gave it by more broadly applying it to the nation itself as an
examplar and preserver to the world of ideal government.

Webster said: "It is, sir, the people's Constitution, the people's
Government; made for the people; made by the people; and answerable to
the people."

This he made the thesis for an argument which was to be followed by a
magnificent peroration ending with a sentiment, calculated for use as
a toast at political banquets, and as a patriotic slogan: "Liberty and
Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!"

Lincoln with purer taste, the expression of which, be it said