Have You Read This?

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 577, 1 February 1929, Page 14

Have You Read This?

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, recently chose for “The Daily Mail” a series of short passages, the “purple patches” of English prose. It is hoped that the series, reprinted here, will pleasantly refresh the memories of some and stir the fresh interest of j others. A NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM ABRAHAM LINCOLN. Dedicatory Address at Gettysburg; Cemetery, 19, 1563. Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), the son of a humble pioneer of the Middle West, rose. mainly by his remarkable powers of oratory , tn the position of President of the United States. In that capacity he had to meet the menace of the secession of the Southern States, and to carry the Civil War, in the face of the pessimism of his Cabinet, to a successful conclusion. Shortly after his election for a second term of office he was murdered by a madman in a theatre in Washington. v FOUR score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war. testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place of those people who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate. w« cannot hallow thi3 ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work they have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honoured dead we take Increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain, that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not nerisb frrrm