C. Edwards Lester, Life and public services of Charles Sumner: Born Jan. 6, 1811. Died March 11, 1874.

1 A European correspondent asked me to give him an idea of Mr. Lincoln's character. I sent the following reply:

You ask me about Mr. Lincoln:—what kind of a man—what kind of a President —he is.

When Mr. Lincoln entered the Presidential mansion, he could not have answered either of these questions himself. It is a matter of doubt if he could do it even now.

It was once a post for the coronation retirement of a statesman, when he had earned the supreme honors of the state. In times of peace our great public men found their legitimate way to the Home of the Presidents—as Washington wished to have the White House called. Those honors then were always worthily won, and the laurel wreath kept green on the brows of all their wearers,—at least till the last of the primitive chieftains went to his untroubled rest under the shades of the ‘Hermitage.’

Yes, those men lived to reap the rich rewards of peace after their battles; of repose after their toils.

But it was no pillow of down on which Abraham Lincoln was invited to lay his head. He thought he understood something of what had been committed to him; and when he stood on the eastern portico of the Capitol, all blanched before the surging, sea of anxious men and women who were waiting to learn ‘What of the night?’ would bring from the new sentinel, he uttered words to which the events of the future were to give an astounding and unforeseen significance.

Lincoln's Presidency has been a heritage of trouble. No good man in his senses would have taken the honor, if he could have foreseen a tithe of its bewildering heart-achings,—the treason, the blood, the agony it would cost the noble nation, betrayed by its own children, immolated before his own eyes,—or the home-troubles it would bring to his fireside.

But the men who voluntarily assume the direction of public, or even private, affairs, must be ready for any emergency. Nobody has any right to assume that everything will go right. Nor is there any ground to suppose that Mr. Lincoln did. On the contrary, his inaugural address clearly proved that his eye had pierced the probable future,—not, indeed, all that future which has since become history, for human ken could not reach so far. But that he has had to confront more surprises, and grapple with more difficulties than could have been known to, or anticipated by any human intelligence, will hardly be denied.

Some peculiar and fortunate qualities in his character have enabled him not only to save the country from ruin, but also to inspire and sustain a most healthy state of the body politic, in the midst of the avalanches and whirlwinds which have struck and shaken our whole system of civic life.

His first characteristic is self-control. He very seldom loses his equanimity. This gives room for the constant exercise of his judgment.

His second characteristic is his good, plaint, home-made common-sense. ‘This is a quality,’ Southey said, ‘rarer than genius.’ So far as all the real business of life is concerned for men or nations, strong common-sense is the surest and safest guide. Through this alembic all the unfriendly and dangerous elements of this terrible conflict have had to pass.

Another quality has mingled itself, by the laws of affinity in moral chemistry, with Mr. Lincoln's executive acts,— humor, bonhommie, good nature. Men have complained of him on this ground. They have charged him with levity. But these critics should remember one of the fine sayings of Malesherbes, the great Frenchman, ‘A fortunate dash of pleasantry has often saved the peace of families,—sometimes of an empire.’ It is fully believed that Mr. Lincoln's cheerfulness has dissipated many a cloud that lowered around the ‘Home of the Presidents,’ and left its fragments ‘in the deep ocean buried.’ And, last of all, his firm faith in the durability of the republic is unbroken. All these qualities, united, make him what he is.