Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889
Abraham Lincoln
By Richard Henry Stoddard (1825–1903)N
In battle, where his Country calls,
Beyond the struggling lines
That push his dread designs
Or, in the last charge, at the head
Of his determined men,
Who must be victors then.
The safer pillars of the State,
Whose calm, mature, wise words
Suppress the need of swords.
Above the noblest of our dead
Do we to-day deplore
The Man that is no more,
Too strange for fear, too vast for hope,
A wonder, blind and dumb.
That waits—what is to come!
If Madness, that dark night, unseen,
Had in our chambers crept,
And murdered while we slept!
Our Lares shivered on the hearth,
The roof-tree fallen, all
That could affright, appall!
Have smitten the rod from royal hands,
But spared, with us, till now,
Each laurelled Cæsar’s brow.
A Man without a precedent,
Sent, it would seem, to do
His work, and perish, too.
The endless tasks, which will not wait,
Which, often done in vain,
Must yet be done again:
Which rose so high, and rolled so far,
Sweeping from sea to sea
In awful anarchy:
Which slowly drained the nation’s life,
(Yet for each drop that ran
There sprang an armèd man!)
By victory, and by defeat,
By courage, patience, skill,
The people’s fixed “We will!”
Without a hand, without a head,
At last, when all was well,
He fell, O how he fell!
The coward shot, the swift escape,
The wife, the widow’s scream—
It is a hideous Dream!
These multitudes of solemn men,
Who speak not when they meet,
But throng the silent street?
Flaunted at each new victory?
(The stars no brightness shed,
But bloody looks the red!)
And turn the streets to funeral aisles?
(No house too poor to show
The nation’s badge of woe.)
The bells that toll of death and doom,
The rolling of the drums,
The dreadful car that comes?
The frenzied brain that hatched the plot,
Thy country’s Father slain
By thee, thou worse than Cain!
And good hath followed—may it now!
(God lets bad instruments
Produce the best events.)
No tyrant was: so mild a sway
In one such weight who bore
Was never known before.
The ruler of a race like ours,
Impatient, headstrong, wild,
The Man to guide the Child.
(So hard the sense of God to hit,)
Did seem to fill his place.
With such a homely face,
(That somehow blundered out the truth,)
Untried, untrained to bear
The more than kingly care.
The proudest in the purple born,
Whose wisdom never grew
To what, untaught, he knew,
No gentleman, like Washington,
(Whose bones, methinks, make room,
To have him in their tomb!)
Who swung the axe, who tilled his lands,
Who shrank from nothing new,
But did as poor men do.
Their curious epitome;
To share yet rise above
Their shifting hate and love.
His thoughts the thoughts of other men:
Plain were his words, and poor,
But now they will endure!
But prudent, cautious, pliant still;
Who since his work was good
Would do it as he could.
And, lacking prescience, went without:
Often appeared to halt,
And was, of course, at fault;
And, loving both sides, angered both:
Was—not like Justice, blind,
But, watchful, clement, kind.
Nor like our stately sires of old:
Perhaps he was not great,
But he preserved the State!
O tender heart, but known to few!
O wonder of the age,
Cut off by tragic rage!
For hark, the mournful, muffled drum,
The trumpet’s wail afar,
And see, the awful car!
While cannon boom and bells toll slow,
And go, thou sacred car,
Bearing our woe afar!
Whose loyal, sorrowing cities wait
To honor all they can
The dust of that good man.
As greatest kings might die to gain.
The just, the wise, the brave,
Attend thee to the grave.
Bronzed veterans, grim with noble scars,
Salute him once again,
Your late commander—slain!
But leave your muskets on the wall;
Your country needs you now
Beside the forge—the plough.
If Mercy may not stay her hand,
Nor would we have it so,
She must direct the blow.)
Who seem so strangely out of place,
Know ye who cometh? He
Who hath declared ye free.
Fall on your knees, and weep, and pray!
Weep, weep—I would ye might—
Your poor black faces white!
With garlands in your little hands,
Of blue and white and red,
To strew before the dead.
The Fallen to his last repose.
Beneath no mighty dome,
But in his modest home;
The quiet spot that suits him best,
There shall his grave be made,
And there his bones be laid.
With memory proud, with pity dumb,
And strangers far and near,
For many and many a year.
While History on her ample page
The virtues shall enroll
On that Paternal Soul.