Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1895-02-28
llNcoLNs GETTYSBURG SPEECH.
Sublime and Immortal. Though Matthew
 Arnold Had Never Heard of It.

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 Sublime and Immortal, Though Matthew
 Arnold Had Never Heard of It.
 I stood close by and heard that speech delivered. It came upon us after the ponderous and elaborate rhetoric of Ed ward Everett like blaze of real fire after Q matchless picture of fire. It sprang, like the strophes of old, out of a chastened heart almost broken with the weight of conquest, but still daunt- less in it's American faith, and the man who spoke the words was, for the mo- ment, transfgured for us, and his fur rowed face and gaunt form took on the light that never was on land or sea, so that he became the archetype of the people themselves, uttering better than he knew the great prayer of that finer and better humanity that our ia. thers and we believed was to come with liberty and equality out of storm and stress and all unshaken confidence in man.
 But I don't think any of us then knew how mastorful Is the speech of the human heart when it comes through the furnace to these great occasions and plants it's sad sincerity by the side of mere scholarship and tho grooved thun. der of rhetoric.
 We had to live on for quater Of century and see that brief speech burn ing with unquenchable flame in our schoolbooks and standing out with mod est majesty on our page of recorded history to comprehend how God can touch with a living coal the lips of q rail splitter just as he touched the lips of tontmaker of Tarsus and lifted tho untutored heart of the shoemaker, Bun- yan, into communion with tho immor- 1 tals.
 Turn it every way you can, the Get tysburg speech stands unique as brief literary and patriotic composition. It is 1 the noblest condensation into the fittest words of all tho emotions. aspirations and sentiments that millions of mute l people wanted at that moment to utter.
 So inwrought is that speech with the heart of tho occasion, and so majestic. ally does it sweep over into the time to come, that should think all men every where would discern its intrinsic quali- ty. But that Is not the case. remember talking with Matthew Arnold when he was in this country about Abraham Incoln-you will re- member that he said of Lincoln that he l had no distinction and l called his attention to the Gettysburg speech. l shall never forget the imperturbahle Saturday Review stare with which he asked, "Ah, what Is the Gettysburg speech?'
 He had never heard of it. believe when he went back ne asked Professor Bryce what 1t was about. and when it was hunted up ill m American school book and shown to him he read it hasti- ly and put it away with eommiserating reticence.
 Suppose you ask M Bourget. who is looking into the American heart by the way of the American bodice and on space rates, if he has read the Gettys- burg speech. happen to know of my own knowledge that Robert Louis Stevenson had not heard of it when he was exploring our continent, and Sir Lepel Griffin and Rudyard Kipling had an idea that it was newspaper fake.
 The current number of The Saturday Review lies open before me, and this is what my eye falls on:
 "The common American dolusion that there have been number of great American poets, that there is indeed such a thing as American literature, disports itself with unusual pomposity. "
 It is impossible for those literary prigs of a special cult to understand that there may be stimulant eondi. tions of national life that wake into tumultuous activity all the higher and better functions of the soul prior to the chartered formulation of thom into an art, and that it is i'll these periods of awakening and not in the after repose of an elaborate astheticism the most precious heartbeats of the race have | made themselves heard and felt some. times in half articulate tones. but often. CT i'll organ blasts which have set the key of liberty and fixed the vocabulary of hope and victory.
 Before eloquence or poetry was an art it was burning soul and fetched its style from the agonies and mysteries of an untutored nature.
 Let us by all means confer distinc- tion on a deathless utteranee by mold ing it in bronze If we add metal enough and surround it with the arabesque of Oxford. future Matthew Arnolds may join the pilgrims and throw the English tribute of we'll turned phrase upon the tablet, which. after all. is but 8 weak hieroglyph of the record in TO, 900, 900 hearts Andrew C. Wheeler