our American holidays. Its celebration in school
and home can not be made too impressive. "Rising as Lincoln did,"
writes Edward Deems, "from social obscurity through a youth of manual
toil and poverty, steadily upward to the highest level of honor in the
world, and all this as the fruit of earnest purpose, hard work, humane
feeling and integrity of character, he is an example and an
inspiration to youth unparalleled in history. At the same time he is
the best specimen of the possibilities attainable by genius in our
land and under our free institutions."

In arranging exercises for Lincoln's Birthday the teacher and parent
should try not so much to teach the bare facts of his career as to
give the children a sense of Lincoln's actual personality through his
own yarns and speeches and such accounts as are given here by Herndon,
Bancroft, Mabie, Tarbell, Phillips Brooks and others. He should show
them Lincoln's greatest single act--Emancipation--through the eyes of
Garfield and Whittier. He should try to reach the children with the
thrill of an adoring sorrow-maddened country at the bier of its great
preserver; with such a passion of love and patriotism as vibrates in
the lines of Whitman, Brownell and Bryant, of Stoddard, Procter, Howe,
Holmes, Lowell, and in the throbbing periods of Henry Ward Beecher.
His main object should be to make his pupils love Lincoln. He should
appeal to their national pride with the foreign tributes to Lincoln's
greatness; make them feel how his memory still works through the years
upon such contemporary poets as Gilder, Thompson, Markham, Cheney and
Dunbar; and finally through the eyes of Harrison, Whitman, Ingersoll,
Newman and others, show them our hero set in his proud, rightful place
in the long vista of the ages.

In order to use the present volume with the best results it is
advisable for teacher and parent to gain a more consecutive view of
Lincoln's life than is offered here.

The standard biography of Lincoln is the monumental one in ten large
volumes by Nicolay and Hay, the President's private secretaries. This
contains considerable material not found elsewhere, but since its
publication in 1890 much new matter has been unearthed, especially by
the enterprise of Miss Ida Tarbell, whose "Life" in two volumes
contains the essentials of the larger official work, is well balanced,
and written in a simple, vigorous style perfectly adapted to the
subject. If only one biography of Lin