" [Footnote: Plato, "Symposium," Jowett's
trans., 1:592.]
The twenty-three centuries since Socrates do not furnish me with a fitter
characterization of Lincoln. His image was as homely as that of Silenus
was bestial. His talk was of ploughs and boats, polecats and whiskey. But
those who opened this homely image found in him a likeness as of no other
man, and in his words a meaning that was of widest and most ennobling
comprehension. And, as Crito said for all ages, after the sun that was on
the hilltops when Socrates took the poison had set and darkness had come:
"Of all the men of his time, he was the wisest and justest and best." So
has the poet of that western democracy given to all time this phrase, sung
in the evening of the day of Lincoln's martyrdom, at the time when the
lilac bloomed and the great star early dropped in the western sky and the
thrush sang solitary: "The sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and
lands." [Footnote: Walt Whitman, "When Lilacs Last."]
We ask ourselves if he was the gift of democracy.
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