ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

TRIBUTES FROM HIS ASSOCIATES.

FOUR GLIMPSES OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN.

UNFRIENDLY NEW YORK-"WE SHALL BEAT THEM, MY SON"- RECEIVES THE RENOMINATION.

BY THE LATE GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.

FROM AN UNPUBLISHED LETTER TO PROFESSOR R. R. WRIGHT, OF THE GEORGIA INDUSTRIAL COLLEGE.

THE first time that I saw Mr. Lincoln he was on his way through New York to be inaugurated. He sat in an open carriage, and was passing down Broadway in front. of the New York Hotel, which was then known as a resort of travellers from the Southern States. It was the seat of great hostility to Mr. Lincoln and his party, and the city of New York, as a whole, was unfriendly to him; and Fernando Wood was mayor. There was very little cheering as Mr. Lincoln passed, and he looked at the people with a weary, melancholy air, as if he felt already the heavy burden of his duty.

I saw him again in Washington, at the White House, in the first winter of the War. It was in the evening, and

I called with his friend, Mr. Isaac N. Arnold, representative for Congress from the Chicago district in Illinois. Mr. Lincoln received us in his office - the large room on the second floor, next to that in which the Cabinet meetings are held. He was dressed in black and wore slippers. On a table at his side were maps and plans of the seat of war; and pins with blue and gray heads represented the position of the soldiers on both sides. He had a weary and anxious look in his sad eyes, and a tenderness of tone in talking that was very touching. He spoke without bitterness toward any person or party, and with the air of a man bearing a most solemn responsibility.

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When we rose to leave, Mr. Lincoln accompanied us to the door of the room, and as he shook my hand and said good by, he said with a paternal kindness and evident profound conviction: "We shall beat them, my son shall beat them." But the air and tone with which he said the words were so free from any unworthy feeling that the most resolute and confident of his opponents would have been deeply impressed.

Again I saw him when, as one of the Committee of the Baltimore Convention, to announce to him his renomination in 1864, I went with my associates to the White House. Mr. Lincoln received us in the East room; and, standing at one side of the room, not at the end, while we formed a semicircle before him, he put on his spectacles and, drawing a manuscript from his pocket, read his little speech of acceptance. Afterward, by appointment of the committee, I wrote a formal letter, to which he returned a reply which was published. The letter itself, written by a secretary, and signed in a firm, legible hand, "Abraham Lincoln," not the usual A. Lincoln, is in my possession.

Last of all, near the New York Hotel, in Broadway, where I had first seen him passing on his way to Washington, I saw his coffin borne along through the immense and reverent throng of the great city on its way to Illinois. The whole country knew then how great and good a man it had lost, the only American whom we name and revere with Washington.

A WONDER AND A MYSTERY.

HIS WISDOM AND HIS TENDERNESS.

BY THE HON. HENRY L DAWES,

LATELY UNITED STATES SENATOR FROM MASSACHUSETTS.

MR. LINCOLN was always to me both a wonder and a mystery. From the day I first saw him, on the morning in which he surprised all Washington by his unexpected and unexplained appearance at the railroad depot while every one else supposed him quietly asleep in Harrisburg, through all the subsequent four years of marvellous achievement, he was to me a study. I could never quite fathom his thoughts, or be quite sure that I saw clearly the line along which he was working. But as I saw how he overcame obstacles and escaped entanglements, how he shunned hidden rocks and steered clear of treacherous shoals, as the tempest thickened, it grew upon me that he was wiser than the men around him. He never altogether lost to me the look with which he met the curious and, for the moment, not very kind gaze of the House of Representatives on that first morning after what they deemed a pusillanimous creep into Washington. It was a weary, anxious look, of one struggling to be cheerful under a burden of trouble he must keep to himself, with thoughts afar off or deep

hidden which he could not impart even to the representatives of the nation to whose Chief Magistracy he had been called and for whom he was to die. I met him many times after this; but it was never my good fortune to meet him on any of the few occasions in all his after life when the sky was so clear and the prospect so cheering as to lift from him the burden of anxiety and distress which so constantly pressed upon him. Indeed, it was in times of the deepest concern that I saw most of him, and therefore when his face, which was always a title-page, most clearly revealed the painful strain of the life he lived. Others were more fortunate in falling under the fascinating influences of the natural man on those few occasions when trouble spared him for a brief interval, lifting its weight from off the springs and impulses of his real life. These were the lights which set off the shades of the four years' picture otherwise painfully sombre.

Every one, however, came away from his presence, whether it was when he was in his serious or lighter mood, impressed with his stature as a man. That which all the world, looking back over the vista of thirty years upon the great events of that period, now concedes with entire unanimity, grew by slow degrees, but more clearly every hour, to be the conviction of those who stood about him, and saw what manner of man he was. The world sees now, what contemporaries were reluctant to believe, that the nation had no other man for the place to which he was assigned by the Great Disposer of those

events.

It would be almost a waste of words to bring up anew to the minds of those who have studied the agencies of different men most conspicuous in the bringing about