Abraham Lincoln by James Russell Lowell
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.
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