" I told the amused lecturer, who had never heard of this
river, at any rate as locally pronounced, that the lad spoke more truly
than the lecturer knew. For to those of even wider horizons, whose
greatest and most beloved hero in history lived and was buried near the
banks of the Sangamon, it is the middle water of the earth.
It is but a little river, and it is but one of the rivers of the valley of
a hundred thousand streams, truly the Medimarenean Land, since all the
oceans are now being gathered about it. The Sangamon flows into the
Illinois, the Illinois into the Mississippi, and the Mississippi is now to
flow into all the seas, even as the life of Lincoln is to flow into all
history.
How little competent I am to speak dispassionately of this great
incarnation of the spirit of those western waters the distorted geography
of the untravelled lad whom the alien lecturer found on the prairies will
suggest, for the river of the home and the fame of Lincoln empties into
the river of my birth.
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