acter, melodious, impressive, nevertheless it had not that sublimation of all these, and with that the power to awaken the imagination which, in argumentative prose, is beauty.

Lincoln had apparently passed through one of those indescribable inward experiences-always, it seems, accompanied by deep gloom—which in mystical natures so often precede a rebirth of the mind. Psychology has not yet analyzed and classified them. But history is familiar with a sufficient number to be sure of their reality. From Saul agonizing in his tent to Luther throwing his inkpot at the devil; from Cromwell wrestling with the Lord to Lincoln striving to be vocal when his mind was dumb-in a hundred instances there is the same range of phenomena, the same spiritual night, the same amazing dawn.

And now the most interesting of the literary questions concerning Lincoln presents itself. It is to be borne in mind that he was essentially non-rhetorical. He towers out of the literary murk of his day through his freedom from rhetoric. And yet, pernicious as it is, mere rhetoricity has its base in genuine artistic impulse. It is art perverted and made unreal, just as sentimentality is sentiment perverted and made unreal. And just as the vision of conduct which sentimentality perceives and spoils is an essential to noble living, so the vision of word-use which rhetoric perceives and spoils is essential to literature. Hitherto Lincoln had been ultra-sensitive to the spoiling done by rhetoricality. Had he been duly sensitive to the vision which the word-jobbers of his day had degraded to their own measure? It may be fairly doubted. But hereafter, in the literary richness of the final manner, no one can doubt the fulness and the range of his vision as an imaginative artificer in words. Had any new influence, purely literary entered into his life? One hesitates to say, and yet there is the following to consider. Lincoln submitted his First Inaugural to Seward. Several of Seward's criticisms he accepted. But Seward, never doubting that he was worth a dozen of the President in a literary way, did not confine himself to criticism. He graciously submitted a wholly new paragraph which Mr. Lincoln might, if he cared to, use as peroration. It read:

I close. We are not, we must not be, aliens or enemies, but fellow countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds

of affection too hardly, they must not, I am sure they will not, be broken. The mystic chords which, proceeding from so many battlefields and so many patriotic graves, pass through all the hearts and all hearths in this broad continent of ours, will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation.

One of the most precious pages in the sealed story of Lincoln's inner life would contain his reflections as he pondered this paragraph. Deeply as he knew the hearts of men, here-in spite of its lack of weight-was something that hitherto he had not been able to use. The power of it in affecting men he must have understood. If it could be brought within his own instrument, assimilated to his own attitude, a new range would be given to his effectiveness. Was he capable of assimilating it? We do not know how he reasoned in this last artistic crisis; but we do know what he did. He made Seward's paragraph his own. Into the graceful but not masterly-the half-way rhetorical-words of Seward he infused his own quality. He reorganized their feeble pattern by means of his own incomparable sense of rhythm. The result was the concluding paragraph of the First Inaugural:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and every patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

The final Lincoln, in the literary sense, had arrived. Though an ultra-delicate critic might find a subdivision of this final period in the year 1862, the point is minute and hardly worth making. During the four years remaining in his life, his style has always the same qualities: flexibility, directness, pregnancy, wealth. It is always applied art, never for an instant unfaithful to the business in hand. Never for an instant does it incrust the business, as the rhetorician would do,-nor ever overlay it with decoration. At the same time it contrives always to compel the business to transact itself in an atmosphere that is

the writer's own creation; an atmosphere in which great thoughts are enriched by golden lustres, while ordinary thoughts bear themselves as do poor souls transfigured, raised momentarily to a level with the great by a passionate vision of great things.

T

CHAPTER XXIII

Education

HE contribution of America to education is in the realm of practical ideas and institutional organization, not in that of philosophical theory or of literature. Even an adequate literary expression of the practical ideals which have dominated in varying form from decade to decade, or of the institutions which sprang therefrom, is rarely found. For the most part the literature has been ephemeral, serving the purposes of its own generation but carrying no great message to subsequent ones; or incidental, forming but a minor interpolated part of some other type of literature. Not until our own generation has there arisen a philosopher to give vitalizing expression to the dominant progressive ideas of America, or scientists to apply in literary form their instruments and methods to the problems of education.

The colonists of the seventeenth century transplanted to a virgin soil the old institutions of Europe. Some, as those of the South or of New Netherland, sought a new home merely to better their economic condition-not to modify a social system with which they were otherwise well satisfied. Some, chiefly of the Middle Colonies, sought to escape from persecution and thus to preserve cherished institutions. Only those of New England were beckoned by the vision of new institutions and customs in conformity with ideals cherished in the home land but not to be realized there.

Of the first type, Berkeley, the testy governor of Virginia, is the best spokesman. Replying in 1672 to the inquiry of the home government as to what policy was pursued in the colony regarding the religious training and education of the youth and of the heathen, he wrote: "The same course that is taken in

England, out of towns, every man according to his ability instructing his children." This represents accurately the condition of a colony where the largest town numbered not over twenty families, and the total population, no greater than that of a London parish, was scattered over a region larger than all England. While this part of the Governor's reply is seldom quoted, the latter part of it, probably inaccurate, certainly misleading, is often given. It continues:

But I thank God there are no free schools or printing, and I hope we shall not have them these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world and printing has divulged them and libels against the best of governments. God keep us from both.

Much of the scanty educational writings of colonial Virginia concerns the founding and the early work of its university, William and Mary, founded in 1693 through the efforts of the Rev. William Blair, a Scotch cleric, the head of the Established Church in the colony. Of this body of material, one bit is of more than ephemeral value. For when the persuasive Blair pleaded for the chartering and endowment of the college by the monarchs on the grounds that the colonists, as well as the people at home, had souls to save, the testy Seymour replied, with more force than elegance, "Damn your souls! Make tobacco!"

The fullest account of Southern colonial education, in fact of Southern colonial life, is Hugh Jones's Present State of Virginia (1724). He pays his compliments to the prevailing type of education in the following description of an important educational custom of the colonial period:

As for education, several are sent to England for it, though the Virginians, being naturally of good parts (as I have already hinted) neither require nor admire as much learning as we do in Britain; yet more would be sent over were they not afraid of the smallpox, which most commonly proves fatal to them. But indeed, when they come to England they are generally put to learn to persons that know little of their temper, who keep them drudging on in what is of little use to them, in pedantic methods, too tedious for their volatile genius. For grammar learning, taught after the common