LAMENTATIONS V: 15, 16, 17, 19. THE JOY OF OUR HEART IS CEASED; OUR DANCE IS TURNED INTO MOURNING. THE CROWN IS FALLEN FROM OUR HEAD. WOE UNTO US, THAT WE HAVE SINNED. FOR THIS OUR HEART IS FAINT. FOR THESE THINGS OUR EYES ARE DIM. * THOU, O LORD! REMAINEST FOREVER! THY THRONE FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION. THIS bright Easter morning is one of the saddest, and, at the same time, one of the most hopeful mornings that ever dawned upon the American people. In the vigor of his days, in the ripeness of his experience as a ruler, in the midst of duties which no man knew or was better qualified to discharge than he, the foremost man of this nation has been struck down by the hand of an assassin. Abraham Lincoln, our President, whose mental and moral vision was as clear and true as a sunbeam, and whose great heart was as tender and loving as a woman's, a man who possessed such a genial and generous nature that he had scarcely a personal enemy in the world, — having guided the republic safely through the darkest night of trial that ever gathered about any people since the foundation of the world, - just when the morning light begins to dawn upon us, giving promise of a long and glorious day, this wise and just and merciful ruler lies murdered in the capital! What language can express our horror of the blow which struck him down? And what shall we say of the hellish power which prompted and aimed the blow? We thought we had already seen the utmost reach of barbarism and savagery of which the slave-power is capable. We had seen it trample on the rights of four millions of people, using them solely for its own infernal lusts. We had seen it make war on the most beneficent and kindly government that was ever devised among men. We had seen it take the slain victims of that war, and of their bones make toys and playthings and personal adornments for its wives and children. We had seen it take the living victims of that war, and transform sixty thousand of them into idiotic skeletons or ghastly corpses by the torturing process of starvation. Ay, in a land teeming with abundance, in the very heart of Georgia, tens of thousands of Federal soldiers, under the direction of Jefferson Davis, and with the consent of Robert E. Lee, -were literally and deliberately and vindictively starved to death, or into hopeless idiocy; and the last breath of many a brave man was spent in offering a pitiful but unanswered cry for bread! And now, to fill the measure of its wickedness, slavery has done WHAT? How shall we characterize its latest deed? What lexicon contains the word by which to fitly call it? What shall we name the act |