But at last silence comes:
These all are gone, and, standing like a tower,
Our children shall behold his fame,
The kindly, earnest, brave, far-seeing man,
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame,
New birth of our new soil, the first American.”
So James Russell Lowell wrote of Lincoln when the celebration of Independence Day in the year of his death revived the vivid sense of loss.
The passage of years have only made clearer how great he was. Perfectly simple, perfectly sincere, he thought out for himself an ideal, and spent the whole of his life and all his strength in pursuing it.
He loved America, not because it was powerful and strong, but because it had been based on a great idea—the idea of liberty: his work for America was to realise that idea. He never thought of his own personal success: he wanted to be President because he saw a great work to be done and believed that he could do it. He never became rich: his own tastes remained entirely simple. He was said to have worn the same top-hat all his life.
The first thing that struck any one about Lincoln was his extraordinary appearance. He always dressed in black, with a big black tie, very often untied, or in the wrong place: his clothes looked as if they had been made to fit some one else, and had never been new. His feet were enormous; so were his hands, covered on state occasions with white kid gloves.