All joy is darkened; the mirth of the land is gone. Isaiah 24.11

"A terrible thing has come upon the land! An awful darkness suddenly shrouded it. The people stand chilled in horror! Pierced, to the life, by unutterable grief. Mourning is everwhere - in the streets - in the air. I hear it in the bell-toll, - see it on the mute lip of these sable drapings of woe. The light of the blessed morning seems charged with its burden. Not only is it in the Capitol, so hushed and awe-stricken; but by every fireside in the land - in every solitary heart. There is no tongue to speak aught else - there is no ear for any other word. 

Our venerated President is no more! Abraham Lincoln, the wise the pure, the noble, the true, is dead! Still in his shroud this morning lies the Chief Magistrate at Washington. He fell by the hand of an assassin on Friday night, in an hour of respite from crushing care, unsuspecting and defenceless. A dastardly fiend in human shape slew him. The mildest of men, the most lenient of living rulers, was murdered, deliberately shot, while in company with his family, by an infamous outlaw, instigated by devils. The loved and trusted leader in our troubles, - the terror of rebels, the discomfiture of treason, - fell victim to the foul plot that has been seeking to murder the nation for the bloody years just past." 

Dudley, John L. Discourse Preached in the South Congregational Church, Middletown, CT., on the Sabbath Morning After the Assassination of President Lincoln. Middletown. D. Barnes. 1865. 28pp.

Textually complete and clean; removed from larger sammelband and thus weakened.