"THE world will little note, nor long remember what we say here. . . ."

Garry Wills has taken note, remembered and given our nation's greatest gathering of words, the Gettysburg Address, new urgency. It has been more than tenscore years since Thomas Jefferson held it to be self-evident that all men are created equal; more than sixscore since Abraham Lincoln committed this nation to that proposition. In 1992, Mr. Wills, despite the dismaying evidence that the proposition is still dishonored, has written a brilliant book demonstrating that Lincoln's words still have power.

This scholarly study of oratory begins with the stink of rotting corpses. When the two great battered armies moved away from Gettysburg in July 1863, they left behind thousands of bodies of horses and men decaying in the summer sun. David Wills, the town's leading citizen, arranged for the animals to be dragged into piles and burned, and, after considerable negotiation, he found workers to bury the men hastily in temporary graves. The reburial of the Union dead was still under way on Nov. 19, when Lincoln delivered his address; Garry Wills has not forgotten that it was a cemetery that Edward Everett and Abraham Lincoln had been invited to dedicate.

In an America steeped in Romanticism, cemeteries were laid out beyond the city as places for a transcendental contemplation of nature, death and duty. Trees, planted along carefully planned meandering roadways on sculptured hills, shaded the tombstones in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass., and the Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, N.Y., and in cemeteries in other cities, including Lincoln's Springfield. Accommodation to thousands of tourists and competition from the adjacent battlefield, studded with equestrian statues glorifying the military, partially defeated the attempt to make Gettysburg such a cemetery, but with Lincoln's indispensable help, this "place of the dead" did indeed become, in Mr. Wills's words, "a school for the living."

WE have not heard much of late about Transcendentalism in American history, but Mr. Wills, the author of numerous works of politics, history and philosophy, locates both Everett (Ralph Waldo Emerson's teacher at Harvard) and Lincoln, "a Transcendentalist without the fuzziness," in that school. It is, he points out, false to see Lincoln's 272 words as mockery of Everett's two hours of lush oratory -- "much like the length and pacing of a modern rock concert." Mr. Wills tells us that Everett did what he was expected to do, and did it well. From memory he extolled the virtues of the warriors and gave carefully researched details of the battle they fought to save the Union that he and his audience revered. If Lincoln's brief but carefully read (and carefully prepared) "Dedicatory Remarks" (as called for in the day's program) were in lean contrast to Everett's "Oration," the two speakers drew on a shared philosophical tradition both men honored.

The 19th century's fascination with things Greek was greatly abetted by Everett, who had been trained in the classics in Germany and was a professor of Greek at Harvard. He and other great orators, like Daniel Webster, were practitioners of elaborate classical oratory. Lincoln had not studied the language, but as an "artist, not just a scholar," he was a greater master than any of the great 19th-century orators in form, even as he was cautious about elaboration. The address has, in Mr. Wills's elegant words, "the chaste and graven quality of an Attic frieze."

Finding the right thing to say about war's dead has troubled leaders (often in no small ways responsible for those deaths) since Pericles chose the words with which he paid tribute to warriors fallen in the Peloponnesian War. Pericles made the funeral oration obligatory (and by questioning the propriety of giving such a speech even as he gave it, he made that question an essential element of the oration). Words to the living must be said over the dead. Twenty-three centuries after Pericles, Everett and Lincoln were carrying out his assignment.

Mr. Wills is deadly serious about words. Perhaps the most striking element of this book is its intricate analysis of the rhetorical structure of the address. It is here that Lincoln is credited with achieving a "revolution in style." To make his point, Mr. Wills compares the address with a classical Greek epitaphios , with its two essential sections, " epainesis , or praise for the fallen, and parainesis , or advice for the living." Lincoln, never having had Everett's or anyone else's course, attended to every requirement -- and added his own.

The result, Mr. Wills asserts, is that "all modern political prose descends from the Gettysburg Address." But Lincoln did far more than establish a model for political writers: "The Address does what all great art accomplishes. Like Keats's Grecian urn, it 'tease [ s ] us out of thought / As doth eternity.' "

THERE was some teasing going on politically as well. Nobody -- including the speaker himself -- knew exactly what he meant. Lincoln was maddeningly -- and deliberately -- unclear. He spoke "with an emotional urgency entirely expressed in calm abstractions (fire in ice)" that threw would-be critics off balance. Carefully avoiding specific issues like those he and Stephen Douglas had forced each other to confront in their famous debates, Lincoln made challenges to his ideals difficult. But he opened the door to a good many questions.

Just what, for example, are the rights and responsibilities of a citizen under a government "of the people"? Scholars have argued over whether Lincoln said "of the people , by the people , for the people ," or whether the prepositions were emphasized. For Mr. Wills, the key to the conundrum lies in the simple article "the" -- " the people."

What is clear is that they are the citizens of a nation, one given a "new birth of freedom." And, he boldly announced, it was a nation that had been "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Lincoln made Jefferson and the signers of the Declaration of Independence, not the creators of the Constitution, the founding fathers. The concept of equality was not in the Constitution; it got there only with the post-Civil War 14th Amendment, thanks in large measure to Lincoln at Gettysburg and his idea of a national citizenship.

Those jurists, Mr. Wills insists, who would bypass the 14th Amendment's protection of individual rights and look only to the intent of the drafters of the original document, will find the author of the Gettysburg Address squarely in their path. Noting that Judge Robert H. Bork "thinks equality as a national commitment has been sneaked into the Constitution," Mr. Wills gleefully adds: "There can be little doubt about the principal culprit."

LINCOLN was caught in the act. Shortly after his address, The Chicago Times chastised the President: "It was to uphold this constitution, and the Union created by it, that our officers and soldiers gave their lives at Gettysburg. How dare he, then, standing on their graves, misstate the cause for which they died, and libel the statesmen who founded the government? They were men possessing too much self-respect to declare that Negroes were their equals, or were entitled to equal privileges."

If no one in 1863, including Lincoln, could give firm definition to his reiteration of Jefferson's famous proposition, no one, in that year of the Emancipation Proclamation, failed to know whom he was talking about. It is less a criticism than a lament to note how little Mr. Wills's rich historical imagination is populated with black Americans. I am not suggesting a gratuitous reference to a leader like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But why, for example, in his study of photographs to settle the exceedingly trivial question of the exact placement of the speakers' stand, did Mr. Wills not note the black man standing in the crowd? Some of the acres of that "great battlefield" were lands of three black farmers. These, after all, were the Americans with the greatest stake in what Lincoln said.

Lincoln was the President of a single nation -- the rebellion had not changed his responsibilities. The rule book for that nation was the Constitution, and under it, as President, he had to countenance slavery where it existed, and could end it only under that document's war powers. He had entered the process of eradicating slavery with his Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, but when he got to Gettysburg, he carefully failed to mention emancipation, or for that matter, the Union, the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence.

Instead, with one brief quotation, he made the Declaration the nation's founding document. Drawing on his own powerful analysis of Jefferson's work, "Inventing America," Mr. Wills declares that Lincoln achieved a "revolution in thought." Lincoln changed the Constitution "from within, by appeal from its letter to the spirit." Mr. Wills writes: "The Gettysburg Address has become an authoritative expression of the American spirit -- as authoritative as the Declaration itself, and perhaps even more influential, since it determines how we read the Declaration."

Mr. Wills may overreach with certain of his assertions. Bringing Lincoln to Gettysburg in his prologue, he says that the President "means to 'win' the whole Civil War in ideological terms as well as military ones. And he will succeed: the Civil War is , to most Americans, what Lincoln wanted it to mean . Words had to complete the work of the guns." Unfortunately, it is not at all clear that most Americans then or now have accepted Lincoln's meaning of the war, and a walk down our city streets in 1992 scarcely suggests that completion of his goal has been reached. But Mr. Wills, vigorously reading, is determined that the words shall still do battle.

In "The Black Cottage," Robert Frost has a befuddled clergyman tell of an old woman whose husband had been killed in Lincoln's war -- "He fell at Gettysburg or Fredericksburg, / I ought to know -- it makes a difference which" -- who refused to forget what the war had been about: One wasn't long in learning that she thought, Whatever else the Civil War was for, It wasn't just to keep the States together, Nor just to free the slaves, though it did both. She wouldn't have believed those ends enough To have given outright for them all she gave. Her giving somehow touched the principle That all men are created free and equal. . . . That's a hard mystery of Jefferson's. What did he mean? Of course the easy way Is to decide it simply isn't true. It may not be. I heard a fellow say so. But never mind, the Welshman got it planted Where it will trouble us a thousand years.

Abraham Lincoln sensed Jefferson's truth in the greatest of all political speeches. Garry Wills, scratching the earth away from the stone and laying bare the language, has handed the mystery over to us, the living. Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place 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 can not dedicate --we can not consecrate -- we can not 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 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. Abraham Lincoln Nov. 19, 1863 'HE READ EVERYTHING ALOUD'

It has been a very long time since anyone parsed a sentence in public. But Garry Wills, who did his Ph.D. dissertation at Yale University on Aeschylus and taught Greek there for six years, revels in grammar and rhetoric as he explains to the reader of "Lincoln at Gettysburg" the precise parallels between the Gettysburg Address and the funeral orations of Pericles and Gorgias in the fifth century B.C.

The modern reaction to the address scarcely includes thought of progonoi or logos/ergon. "But you are naive to think that such a speech was not the product of training and discipline," Mr. Wills said in a telephone interview from his home in Evanston, Ill. Citing artists from Michelangelo to Fred Astaire (who said the skill lies in making it look easy), Mr. Wills asked, "Why would you think such a speech would just pop into one's head?"

Lincoln cared about the "music of words," Mr. Wills continued. "He read everything aloud, even the newspapers, driving his aides crazy." Such care for cadence is hard to find today. Why? Mr. Wills said, "There has been a tremendous change in the pace of life, which began with the introduction of the telegraph, a change that Lincoln recognized. And we now educate people on a scale far beyond that of the 19th century. Teaching writing is extremely difficult and labor-intensive, and Cicero's advice to an orator is still valid: write, write, write -- write with the idea of hearing the words." -- BARTH HEALEY