The Gettysburg Address

President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, which Dr. Eliot specially mentions in his introduction, while not a poem in form, embodies the loftiest conception of what true patriotism really is. For that reason this world classic is here inserted at the head of patriotic poems. FOURSCORE brought forth and on this sevencontinent years agoanew our fathers nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in agreat civil war, test- ing 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 restingplace for those 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, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor 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 which they who fought here 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 honored dead we take increased devotion to AMERICA that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion ; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.