c,
the third as political reformer, the fourth as poet and mystic; and
these various sides of his personality continue to appear with varying
prominence throughout his career._

_On the retirement of Longfellow from the chair of belles-lettres at
Harvard in 1854, Lowell was elected to succeed him, and by way of
preparation spent the next two years in Europe studying modern
languages and literatures. In 1857 he became the first editor of the
"Atlantic Monthly," and after 1864 he collaborated with Charles Eliot
Norton in the editorship of the "North American Review." Throughout
the period of the war Lowell wrote much both in prose and verse on
behalf of the Union; his work on the "North American" was largely
literary criticism._

_In 1877 Lowell went to Spain as American Minister, and in 1880 to
London, where for five years he represented the United States with
great distinction, and did much to improve the relations of the two
countries. Six years after his return, on August 12, 1891, he died in
Elmwood, the house in Cambridge where he was born._

_Lowell's literary gifts were so various that it is difficult to say on
which of them his final reputation will rest. But it is certain that
he will long be esteemed for the grace, vivacity, and eloquence of the
prose in which he placed before the world his views of such great
American principles and personalities as are dealt with in the two
following essays on "Democracy" and on "Abraham Lincoln."_

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

1864-1865

By arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company.

There have been many painful crises since the impatient vanity of South
Carolina hurried ten prosperous Commonwealths into a crime whose
assured retribution was to leave them either at the mercy of the nation
they had wronged, or of the anarchy they had summoned but could not
control, when no thoughtful American opened his morning paper without
dreading to find that he had no longer a country to love and honor.
Whatever the result of the convulsion whose first shocks were beginning
to be felt, there would still be enough square miles of earth for
elbow-room; but that ineffable sentiment made up of memory and hope, of
instinct and tradition, which swells every man's heart and shapes his
thought, though perhaps never present to his consciousness, would be
gone from it, leaving it common earth and nothing more. Men might
gather rich crops from it, but that ideal harvest of priceless
asso