The Perfect Tribute | Page 2

for taking infinite pains" which has been
defined as genius, he labored as the hours flew, building together
close-fitted word on word, sentence on sentence. As the sculptor must
dream the statue prisoned in the marble, as the artist must dream the
picture to come from the brilliant unmeaning of his palette, as the
musician dreams a song, so he who writes must have a vision of his
finished work before he touches, to begin it, a medium more elastic,
more vivid, more powerful than any other--words--prismatic bits of
humanity, old as the Pharaohs, new as the Arabs of the street, broken,
sparkling, alive, from the age-long life of the race. Abraham Lincoln,
with the clear thought in his mind of what he would say, found the
sentences that came to him colorless, wooden. A wonder flashed over
him once or twice of Everett's skill with these symbols which, it
seemed to him, were to the Bostonian a key-board facile to make music,
to Lincoln tools to do his labor. He put the idea aside, for it hindered
him. As he found the sword fitted to his hand he must fight with it; it
might be that he, as well as Everett, could say that which should go
straight from him to his people, to the nation who struggled at his back
towards a goal. At least each syllable he said should be chiselled from

the rock of his sincerity. So he cut here and there an adjective, here and
there a phrase, baring the heart of his thought, leaving no ribbon or
flower of rhetoric to flutter in the eyes of those with whom he would be
utterly honest. And when he had done he read the speech and dropped
it from his hand to the floor and stared again from the window. It was
the best he could do, and it was a failure. So, with the pang of the
workman who believes his work done wrong, he lifted and folded the
torn bit of paper and put it in his pocket, and put aside the thought of it,
as of a bad thing which he might not better, and turned and talked
cheerfully with his friends.
At eleven o'clock on the morning of the day following, on November
19, 1863, a vast, silent multitude billowed, like waves of the sea, over
what had been not long before the battle-field of Gettysburg. There
were wounded soldiers there who had beaten their way four months
before through a singing fire across these quiet fields, who had seen the
men die who were buried here; there were troops, grave and
responsible, who must soon go again into battle; there were the rank
and file of an everyday American gathering in surging thousands; and
above them all, on the open-air platform, there were the leaders of the
land, the pilots who to-day lifted a hand from the wheel of the ship of
state to salute the memory of those gone down in the storm. Most of the
men in that group of honor are now passed over to the majority, but
their names are not dead in American history--great ghosts who walk
still in the annals of their country, their flesh-and-blood faces were
turned attentively that bright, still November afternoon towards the
orator of the day, whose voice held the audience.
For two hours Everett spoke and the throng listened untired, fascinated
by the dignity of his high-bred look and manner almost as much,
perhaps, as by the speech which has taken a place in literature. As he
had been expected to speak he spoke, of the great battle, of the causes
of the war, of the results to come after. It was an oration which missed
no shade of expression, no reach of grasp. Yet there were those in the
multitude, sympathetic to a unit as it was with the Northern cause, who
grew restless when this man who had been crowned with so thick a
laurel wreath by Americans spoke of Americans as rebels, of a cause
for which honest Americans were giving their lives as a crime. The
days were war days, and men's passions were inflamed, yet there were

men who listened to Edward Everett who believed that his great speech
would have been greater unenforced with bitterness.
As the clear, cultivated voice fell into silence, the mass of people burst
into a long storm of applause, for they knew that they had heard an
oration which was an event. They clapped and cheered him again and
again and again, as good citizens acclaim a man worthy of honor whom
they have delighted to honor. At last, as the ex-Governor of
Massachusetts, the ex-ambassador to England, the ex-Secretary of State,
the ex-Senator of the United States--handsome, distinguished, graceful,
sure