I am loathe to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.



The closing paragraph of the first Inaugural Address of President Abraham Lincoln, given on this date in 1861. It's not as penetrating and closely reasoned an analysis of events and disputes as his great exposition at the Cooper Union in Manhattan on 27 February 1860. Nor has it the sublime nobility of the Second Inaugural Address in 1865, among the greatest prose works in the history of the United States. But, especially in these closing words, it has a power and gravity that bring vividly to our mind the tortured year in which it was composed. And in the aching grace of those words is a message that speaks still to our heart.