Excerpt from Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln: Delivered at Concord, New Hampshire, June 1, 1865, at the Request of the State Authorities

In glad compliance with the proclamation of the public authorities, the people of the commonwealth have rested to-day from their ordinary vocations and have gathered here at the Capital of the State, to represent the universal sorrow, and pay a formal but heartfelt tribute of grief and respect to the memory of our murdered chief magistrate, who, like Israel's great leader, fell on the mount of vision, "while yet his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated."

The irrepressible sorrow of our hearts prompts to the filial duty which, as a nation, we could not innocently neglect.

It is the Christian apotheosis which a bereaved people may give to a ruler, the grand results of whose life, and the masculine beauty of whose character, have entitled him to the honor of father of the reestablished and regenerated republic.

Treason, the cowardly offspring of slavery, in dalliance with political ambition, returning with reeking hands from the slaughter of three hundred thousand of our innocent children, and burning with the shame of defeat, has assassinated the foremost, the noblest and the best of our great men, and has thereby illustrated to the shocked and startled nations of the world the inherent wrong of oppression and the unutterable preciousness of liberty.

The time, too, was ominous and suggestive.

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