LITTLE ROCK — PRESIDENTIAL inaugurations are milestones in American politics and even history. And they may indicate a lot more than how far we have come and may have to go. To borrow a phrase from a president named Lincoln, they may tell us where we are and whither we are tending. They can mark crisis or continuity, triumph or tragedy. Or, like yesterday’s, nothing in particular.

Lines from some inaugurals still speak to us. Powerfully. After the low, fierce, ugly campaign of 1800, which unfortunately set something of a precedent in American politics, the new president, Thomas Jefferson, informed the still young and uncertain Republic: “We are all Federalists, we are all Republicans.”

Other inaugural addresses, one delivered as war and chaos were hanging over the country’s head, would prove even more memorable.

Abraham Lincoln, just sworn in as the president of an already divided Union, would end with a final plea: “I am loath 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.’’ A month later, the first shells would be fired at Fort Sumter.

In the next century, in the midst of the greatest economic depression in American history, which would come to be known as The Depression, and as still another world war was brewing overseas, the new, ever-buoyant president assured his fellow citizens that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” And that this country with its institutions would endure as it has endured. It did.

The greatest of inaugural addresses, a work of literature and prophecy as well as history and politics, has to be Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, delivered “with malice toward none, with charity for all . . .” It is still not only quoted but revered. We don’t think Barack Obama’s Second Inaugural will be. Twenty-four hours later, does anyone remember what he said?

We made ourselves listen to every word-it’s our job-and found it not even bad enough to be interesting, a vast sea of platitudes broken only occasionally not by anything exciting but only excruciating. Did our just re-inaugurated president really speak of Peace in Our Time, or did we just imagine that tribute, conscious or unconscious, to the poor spirit of Neville Chamberlain? We hope we imagined it, but fear we did not.

Were we all supposed to thrill to the wadding of boilerplate that surrounded such gaucheries yesterday? In the end it all came to sound like one more PowerPoint presentation rather than a presidential Inaugural, with polspeak extending as far as the national debt.

But we did cheer at the end. In relief. We suspect it was a common reaction from coast to bored coast. And that the cheers were as sincere as those that once greeted a young governor of Arkansas as he reached the most awaited words of his first address to a great national convention: “In conclusion . . .” More welcome words have scarcely been uttered in a public address.

As all the transient foofaraw of the Inauguration proceeded yesterday, we held fast to this thought: There is still goodness in this country, there is still resolve, there is still an American Spirit. And it will yet be summoned and felt. It will yet call and will be responded to.

In a phrase we’ve adapted from Scott Fitzgerald’s American masterpiece, a phrase we regularly repeat to ourselves in the midst of some political speech that threatens never to end, that American spirit is still “somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic roll on under the night.”

Editorial, Pages 12 on 01/22/2013