Abraham Lincoln is not dead. Emancipated from the thraldom of time, he has stepped beyond the trammels of birth, and race, and state. He lives in an epic all his own; in ever widening spiritual leadership; in the splendor of realized ideals; in inspiration to good citizenship and in multiplying memorials in literature and art, in progress and reform, in patriotism and philanthropy, in education and humanitarianism.

Hill’s tribute treats Lincoln not as a merely historical figure but as a continuing moral force. By saying Lincoln is “emancipated from the thraldom of time,” Hill argues that Lincoln’s significance has outgrown the contingencies of biography—birthplace, party, region, even race politics—and entered the realm of enduring civic myth. The catalogue of arenas in which Lincoln “lives” (citizenship, reform, education, humanitarianism, art) frames him as a unifying exemplar whose legacy is measured less by monuments than by the ethical and democratic energies he continues to inspire. The rhetoric elevates Lincoln into an “epic,” suggesting a national scripture of ideals rather than a closed chapter of the past.