Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Abraham Lincoln: Address by Hon. Wm, S. Kyle at the Lincoln Memorial Exercises, Plymouth, Mass, High School, February 12, 1909
We are met this morning to briefly review his life, and to consider for a little while some of those great events in which he was the central and commanding figure; events which endear his memory and make us debtors to him for evermore. The progress of humanity is measured by the careers of such great souls as he; and history is hallowed by the precious legacy of their words and deeds.
Abraham Lincoln was born a century ago today, in a lonely pioneer home, that was little better than a hovel, away out on the Kentucky frontier, at that time the outermost rim of our civilization. His parents were unspeakably poor, their comforts few, their hard lot unrelieved by any refinements of life, the daily task one of' grinding toil.
The boy Abraham inherited from his father a robust phy sique, and from his gentle mother a simple sincerity, a love of truth, a regard for the right, and a warm, sympathetic, kindly spirit. We look in. Vain for inheritances or environment, for in?uences or atmosphere, surrounding his childhood and early formative years, to account for his wonderful rise to fame. This little boy who became the greatest man of his century, and is today the best loved man in history, had neither birth nor breeding, nor cultured outlook on life to explain the gifts he acquired, and the wisdom and power he displayed in. His great career. The little schooling he had at intervals amounted to only a few months in all. It seemed a most unpromising start im life.
In his eighth year he moved with his family to Indiana and settled on the edge of an unbroken forest, the clearing of which was the toilsome task of several years but young as Abraham was he shared in the hard work, for even then he could handle an ax with vigor.
When ten years old his first great sorrow came in the death of his mother. In a rude coffin made by his father she was laid in her lonely grave without even a prayer. A short time after the broken hearted boy walked barefoot a hundred miles to beg a minister to come and give her Christian burial.
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