And not long after I heard that Isabel's husband had
been killed in that terrible battle. She did not write me. The silence
of life had come over us.
I read the Gettysburg address of Lincoln. It moved me like a symphony.
But I did not believe it to be true. This government was not conceived
in liberty. It was not dedicated to the proposition that all men are
created equal. We were not engaged in a strife which tested whether this
government so conceived and so dedicated could survive. The South could
have set up a separate government and the same liberty and the same
equality which informed the union would have remained intact. Isabel's
husband, and the other thousands who had died there had not consecrated
the ground unless the Union meant something more than a union. It had to
mean liberty and more than the emancipation of the negroes for that
ground to be consecrated. And a few years later its glory was detracted
from by the machinations of merchants who grew fat on the blood of that
battle. And yet I was moved by Lincoln's words more profoundly than by
anything that I had ever read.
CONCLUSION
It is April 23d, 1900. Three hundred and thirty-six years ago to-day a
man named Shakespeare was born. He lived with some gnawing at his heart,
wrote some plays, and died. He was wise enough, I fancy, to see that the
joke is on those who remain in life, not those who leave it.
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