Thus the visible incidents and surroundings of Abraham Lincoln's
murder, as they really occur'd. Thus ended the attempted secession
of these States; thus the four years' war. But the main things come
subtly and invisibly afterward, perhaps long afterward--neither
military, political, nor (great as those are,) historical. I say,
certain secondary and indirect results, out of the tragedy of this
death, are, in my opinion, greatest. Not the event of the murder
itself. Not that Mr. Lincoln strings the principal points and
personages of the period, like beads, upon the single string of his
career. Not that his idiosyncrasy, in its sudden appearance and
disappearance, stamps this Republic with a stamp more mark'd and
enduring than any yet given by any one man--(more even than
Washington's;)--but, join'd with these, the immeasurable value and
meaning of that whole tragedy lies, to me, in senses finally dearest
to a nation, (and here all our own)--the imaginative and artistic
senses--the literary and dramatic ones. Not in any common or low
meaning of those terms, but a meaning precious to the race, and to
every age. A long and varied series of contradictory events arrives at
last at its highest poetic, single, central, pictorial denouement.
The whole involved, baffling, multiform whirl of the secession
period comes to a head, and is gather'd in one brief flash of
lightning-illumination--one simple, fierce deed. Its sharp
culmination, and as it were solution, of so many bloody and angry
problems, illustrates those climax-moments on the stage of universal
Time, where the historic Muse at one entrance, and the tragic Muse at
the other, suddenly ringing down the curtain, close an immense act in
the long drama of creative thought, and give it radiation,
tableau, stranger than fiction.
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